AuthorMark Hansen

In the December 2019 edition of The New Yorker, Patricia Marx writes about “Taking Virtual Reality for a Test Drive.” Reality being what it is right now, doesn’t an alternative sound tempting? That’s what I was thinking the other day, in my apartment, when I adjusted the Velcro straps on my Oculus Quest, a chunky

The last session of the Transparency Series took place last Saturday and featured Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed’s media editor. Silverman has an incredible record of reporting on Twitter and social media platforms generally. During the day-long workshop, he shared his strategies for breaking stories down into “actors, content, behavior, and networks.” His investigative routine when looking

On the evening of October 9, Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul unveiled her project “Democracy Fighters” at Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl in Mexico City. The launch event was picked up by news outlets in Mexico. Mexico City’s leading daily newspaper, La Jornada, posted a video, featuring an interview with Alejandra. “Defensores de la Democracia reúne el trabajo de

On the evening of October 9, the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Article 19 gathered at Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl in Mexico City for the launch of Democracy Fighters, a digital archive that aggregates and preserves the works of journalists killed in Mexico. Since 2000, 111 journalists and media workers have been

… if only it was just a little longer! But the end of summer means that the 2018-2019 cohort of Magic Grants are coming to a close — the teams have spent nearly a year on their projects and this summer was the time to wrap-up prototypes, refine code, and finish their reporting. While all

The Institute at Columbia has two open positions — one for a creative technologist and one for a database aficionado. The first person will conduct original “creative research” that expands on traditional forms of journalism and storytelling. They should work easily with teams of journalists, other members of the Brown Institute, and the larger creative

NewsCounts, a Knight Foundation funded project, is seeking two Research Scholars to help report on the 2020 U.S. Census and its role in American democracy — from privacy in the decennial count, to its impacts on funding across the country, to how journalists find and tell stories in the numbers. NewsCounts was just featured on

NOAH is a mapping application created by Disha Shetty, Maya Miller, Pankhuri Kumar and Ravie Lakshmanan, alumni of Columbia Journalism School, and Pietro Ceccato of SPACEBEL. It was made possible by a grant from the Brown Institute. This is a short report on NOAH’s development, and how can be used to uncover underreported stories on