Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism

Columbia Global Reports is a publishing project founded at Columbia University in 2014 that bridges the worlds of investigative, long-form journalism and trade publishing. It commissions authors to produce works of original thinking and influence on a wide range of topics through extensive in-depth interviewing, historical awareness, empathetic understanding, literary and narrative vividness, and on-site reporting from around world. The resulting books are short but ambitious and offer new ways of understanding the major issues of our time.  

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (the Dart Center) is dedicated to supporting informed, innovative, and ethical news reporting on violence, conflict, and tragedy. It conducts research, and provides fellowships, awards, newsroom training, hosts specialized reporting institutes and creates online resources to advance best practices in covering traumatic events ranging from family violence to disaster and war. This grant provides flexible support for the Dart Center, and the intended outcomes are activities, programs, and research that creates new understanding of, and mitigation and support for, journalists who experience trauma because of their work informing the public.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism (Tow Center), housed within the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, explores the ways in which technology is changing journalism, its practice and consumption. Established in 2010, it commissions research and develops teaching methods and courses to help advance practice in the field and to influence policy debate. With an interdisciplinary group of academics and researchers, this flexible support grant enables the Tow Center to continue its efforts to explore the ways in which the large technology platforms are influencing the quality of news, the public’s trust of news institutions, and the impact of policy interventions on the free flow of quality news and information. It is also launching two new areas of research to examine the impact of closed technology platforms on news gathering, reporting and consumption at the local level, and a reimagining of public media for today’s world. The goal of this work is to create a new future for journalism – one that is based on a new set of ethics, norms, and institutions designed to support a free and independent press in a platform-based media ecosystem.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism (Tow Center), housed at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, explores the ways in which technology is changing journalism, its practice and consumption. Established in 2010, it commissions research and develops teaching methods and courses to help advance practice in the field. This grant provides flexible support to the Tow Center to research and monitor the impact of large scale technology on journalism across four broad areas of inquiry: 1) local journalism, 2) artificial intelligence, 3) digital forensics, and 4) alternative approaches to innovation in the newsroom outside of the confines of large technology platforms. The goal of this work is to create a new future for journalism – one that is based on a new set of ethics, norms, and institutions designed to support a free and independent press in a platform-based media ecosystem.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University explores the ways in which technology is changing journalism, its practice and consumption. Established in 2010, it commissions research and develops teaching methods and courses to help advance practice in the field. This grant supports the Tow Center to study how journalism and independent publishing are affected by the distribution of content via social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, and how technology companies are responding to their new role as part of the free press. Grant funds are enabling the Tow Center to carry out empirical research about the nature, research and impact of news content published online and to hold a series of consultations with stakeholders from both the journalism industry and Silicon Valley to surface issues that directly relate to the health of an independent press. This work is helping to expand the understanding of journalism in a multi-platform world, making online publishing platforms more transparent about the role they play in disseminating news, and identifying a set of stakeholders from media, technology and academia who can work together to shape future policies.