The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation will encourage new media, promote innovation and prototypes, and “recognise the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology”, the schools said in a joint statement.
David Brown, who died early last year, graduated from Stanford and the Columbia School of Journalism. He was a Hollywood producer whose hits included “The Sting”, “Cocoon” and “Driving Miss Daisy”.
Each school will receive US$12 million for the new institute. The gift to Columbia’s Journalism School in New York, the largest in its history, will endow a professorship that will serve as the institute’s east coast director.
The gift to Stanford’s Engineering School in Palo Alto, California, will endow the position of the west coast director.
Another US$6 million will go to Columbia to build a “highly visible signature space” that will feature a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom, the schools said.
“Great content needs useable technology,” Helen Gurley Brown said in a statement. “Sharing a language is where the magic happens.”
Brown, 89, was editor from 1965 to 1996 at Cosmopolitan, a lively, sometimes racy, magazine aimed largely at single women during her tenure. She also has written several books, including the groundbreaking and popular “Sex and the Single Girl” in 1962. — Reuters
