Info Session: Brown Institute Challenge in Journalism, Media, & Technology

Join us for this info session designed for the Spring '23 Brown Institute Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology

The Brown Institute at Columbia Journalism School, in partnership with the Spring ’23 Columbia Venture Competition and Columbia Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Design are pleased to announce a competition for Columbia students, alumni, and their collaborators.

Now in its second year, this Journalism Challenge rewards new entrepreneurial ventures in journalism, media and technology. Perhaps you want to create new kinds of journalism or new kinds of content, design new forms of participation, contribute to our understanding of media and society, or experiment with entirely new ways to communicate.

This info session also covers programs that surround and support the Spring '23 Journalism Challenge including:

• Tips from Last Year's Winner
• Innovation Challenge Storytelling Workshop
• News Product Sprint
• Brown's Summer Program

Consider entering your venture in the Brown Institute Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology! The application deadline is March 8th, 2023. Enter Today.

Winning teams will receive cash prizes and fellowships for the Brown Institute’s 2023 Summer Program in Entrepreneurship. The summer program ends with one final competition which could award up to $100,000 to one of the participating ventures.

Successful projects can be either for-profit or non-profit. We will weigh business successes and social impacts equally. While a competition, this challenge helps take ideas from inception to pitch. First-time founders are encouraged to enter — we will provide ample resources to help you through the process!

The Brown Institute Innovation Challenge is part of the 2023 Columbia Venture Competition. Now in its eighth year, the Columbia Venture Competition ranks among the nation’s top five largest, university-based business plan competitions.

Awards!

• The winning venture in the Brown Institute Innovation Challenge will receive $15,000, the second-place prize is $10,000, with $5,000 going to the third-place team.

• The Brown Institute Innovation Challenge is just the start of a larger program to encourage new ventures in journalism, media, and technology. The teams winning the challenge (and one or two of the other finalists) will also receive paid 10-week fellowships (up to two people per team, on top of their prize money) to participate in Brown’s Summer 2023 Program in Entrepreneurship, designed to further develop ventures, and produce a pitch and prototypes.

• Brown’s summer program ends with one final competition which could award one of the participating teams up to $100,000 to continue work on their venture!

Some details

This Innovation Challenge seeks proposals for new tech-based or tech-enabled forms of media — these might make novel uses of computer vision, AI, NLP, machine learning, data visualization or even VR/AR to create, communicate, and interpret content. Eligible ventures can also be topically aligned, building custom platforms to explore complex issues in new ways. What are the long-term societal impacts of COVID? Are communities equally prepared for Climate Change? How can we spot or intervene with mis/disinformation? How can we leverage the latest advances in deep learning to assist with business and content operations within news organizations? (To be successful, a topically-oriented application must have a plan for sustainability, as this challenge is meant to support new ventures and not to produce a single published news story— for that see our Magic Grant Call for Proposals).

Our Innovation Challenge extends a special welcome to ventures that focus on the practice of journalism — developing tools to aid investigations, say, or designing new visualization platforms to experience stories. Projects might also address the business of journalism, proposing new models for local media or sustainable approaches to delivering content to underserved communities.

About the Summer Entrepreneurship Program

Winners of the 2023 Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology will automatically be enrolled in the Brown Institute’s Summer Entrepreneurship Program. Participants will receive an $8k stipend to attend the program and will have semi-weekly meetings held in the main Brown Institute space in Pulitzer Hall. The program will be led by Justin Hendrix, former head of the NYC Media Lab and now Editor in Chief of the Technology Policy Press, and takes place from mid-June through mid-August 2023. The program will bring founders together semi-weekly and is a modified version of the Lean Launch Bootcamp. Through a mix of instruction, assignments, and field trips to startups around New York City, founders will learn what it takes to move their idea from concept to pitch. At the end of the ten-week program, founders can pitch for a final grant of up to $100k and become part of the 2022-2023 Magic Grant cohort of projects.

Important Dates

• February 17, 2023 - Information Session [Optional]
• February 25/26 and March 4, 2023 - News Product Sprint [Optional]
• March 8, 2023 - Innovation Challenge Application Deadline
• March 22/23, 2023 - Pitch Sessions, Round 1
• March 30, 2023 - Pitch Sessions, Round 2
• April 4, 2023 - Finalist Pitch Session

Eligibility

General details for CVC eligibility can be found here.

Note: This program is not meant to support the production of a single published news story — it is meant for ventures that will have sustained impacts. If you are looking for support for a single-story idea, please contact the Brown Institute about our Magic Grant Program at browninstitute@columbia.edu.

About Summer Delaney -- Winner of the 2022 Brown Institute Innovation Challenge

Summer will be sharing her best tips for competing in the Innovation Challenge. Summer is an award-winning journalist, content strategist, and member of the creator community. She is the founder and CEO of CollabWORK, the first community-empowered hiring platform that leverages online communities and advanced AI algorithms to match talent with top creative jobs.

Over the past decade, Summer has grown digital communities and produced award-winning content at CNN, Yahoo News with Katie Couric, CBS Interactive and Tribune Media where her videos have received over 500 million views. She has also worked as a consultant and a program manager at Amazon Studios, News Corp, Protégé and Wilde. Summer was honored by the New York State Broadcasters Association during the Excellence in Broadcasting Awards for "Outstanding Social Media Personality." Her work also contributed to Tribune Media winning several digital innovation awards from the Local Media Association, including best social media strategy and best new digital initiative.

Summer received her BS from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and her MBA from Columbia Business School.

About CollabWORK

CollabWORK is revolutionizing the $140B staffing and talent search industry by leveraging online communities and advanced AI algorithms to match talent with top jobs. Unlocking the power of endorsement at scale through access to curated and exclusive networks, our subscription-based product distributes creative, media, and communications jobs to vetted professional communities of qualified candidates. Our proprietary referral and AI-vetting approach alleviates expensive and arduous recruiting processes for companies, providing the highest quality talent at unparalleled speed and cost efficiency (on average, referred candidates are hired 55% faster than candidates sourced via traditional job sites).

About Justin Hendrix - CEO and Editor, Tech Policy Press. Justin will lead the summer program

Justin is the Founder, CEO, and Editor of the Tech Policy Press, a not-for-profit media and community venture that seeks to advance and influence the public discourse on the relationship between technology and democracy. Justin also currently holds an appointment at New York University as an adjunct Instructor of Integrated Digital Media at the Tandon School of Engineering.

Prior to his current positions, Justin was the Executive Director of the New York City Media Lab which connects companies seeking to advance digital media technologies with university capabilities in order to drive entrepreneurship and innovation. Launched by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, NYU, and Columbia University, NYC Media Lab is a public-private partnership encompassing all the universities of NYC and corporate members such as Viacom, ESPN, Bloomberg, MLB Advanced Media, The Weather Company, Singtel, Hearst, Verizon, Weather Company, NBCUniversal and more. The Lab's goal is to generate fresh thinking that creates value through research, prototyping, knowledge transfer, talent development, and entrepreneurship.