Magic Grant Information Session (Columbia)
2026-03-30 17:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | Virtual (Information Session)
The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute at Columbia Journalism School and the School of Engineering at Stanford are delighted to announce its 2026-2027 Magic Grant program. Applications are due April 1, 2026! To provide more information about our grants and the application process, the Brown Institute is hosting Magic Grant Information Sessions.
Each year, the Brown Institute awards close to $1M in grants to help you “follow your passion and experiment with new approaches to storytelling,” to paraphrase Helen Gurley Brown.
Our “Magic Grants” are a unique blend of technology and media. Grantees develop new ways to find and tell stories — producing platforms that extend our creativity, or creating powerful new works of journalism.

A Magic Grant can mean financial support for you and your team for up to a year (fellowships at Columbia, research positions at Stanford)
A Magic Grant can provide funding for your project — for production, prototyping, or purchasing services, software or equipment
A Magic Grant offers access to mentorship and our extensive alumni network

The Magic Grant program provides year-long funding awards of up to $150,000 ($300,000 for teams with members of both the Columbia and Stanford communities and their collaborators). In addition to funding, grantees have access to a distinguished advisory and mentoring group, and an extensive and inspiring alumni network.
If you’re interested in learning more about our Magic Grant offerings, come to our upcoming information session where you can find out:

The types of projects we’re interested in supporting
The various types of support we offer to grantees & fellows
Eligibility guidelines
How our staff can help you develop your proposal
How to apply

Register to Attend an Information Session
Zoom for Information Session
If you have any questions, write to us at browninstitute@columbia.edu.

AI Club
2026-04-02 12:00 - 14:00 | Brown Institute at Columbia, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY, 10027, United States
This week, we’re using AI to help us scrape data from the web! Instead of our usual instructor-led format, we’ll start by exploring how the web actually works — looking at the sites we visit and how traffic moves between our browsers and servers. From there, we’ll review traditional web scraping workflows before diving into new strategies for using LLMs to tackle these same tasks. For the main part of the session, we’ll break into teams to perform a web scrape, then use an LLM to turn that data into a simple visualization.
Register and learn more at jschoolai.club.

Media Party NYC
2026-05-08 - 2026-05-10 | Brown Institute at Columbia, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY, 10027, United States
From May 8 to 10, 2026, Columbia University’s Brown Institute hosts Media Party NYC, bringing together 300 journalists, technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs from around the world to take on the forces reshaping news: AI-driven workflows, shifting audience behavior, and the creators and platforms now mediating how people find information.
We’re in a post-search era. A generation now encounters journalism through individual creators and vertical video, and traditional consumers are increasingly getting their information straight from AI platforms. Not homepages, not search, not television broadcasts. Newsrooms worldwide are adopting generative AI tools, but unevenly, at different scales, applied to different problems, with results that range from genuine editorial advancement to cautionary failures. These shifts look different from Buenos Aires to Nairobi to New York, and understanding that variation is essential to any serious response.
At a critical moment for the industry, Media Party focuses squarely on this transition: exploring how newsrooms and content creators must adapt when AI reshapes the information landscape.
Register to Attend
The Program
Media Party is not a traditional conference. It combines keynotes, workshops, a media fair, and a hackathon. It is a workspace designed to create the conditions for innovation to actually happen. Innovators from media organizations, small and large, technology providers ranging from startups to big platforms, and the scientific and open source communities will convene across four themes:

News Influencers & Vertical Video
Individual journalists are increasingly becoming the primary distribution channel for news, building audiences on platforms optimized for personality over institution. What does this shift mean for editorial standards, ethical boundaries, and sustainable business models, and how creator dynamics differ across media markets worldwide?
Local News & Civic Technology
AI tools promise new capabilities for under-resourced newsrooms: automated translation, audience engagement, data analysis at scale. But implementation demands more than technology. How do we ensure that things as crucial as understanding community trust, local information ecosystems, and the specific vulnerabilities of civic journalism are valued by the platforms and systems we adopt?
Internal Tools & AI Workflows
Newsrooms are building and adopting AI systems with limited cross-industry collaboration and inconsistent evaluation. This track creates space for practitioners to compare approaches, surface what hasn’t worked, and develop frameworks for assessing AI tools in real production environments.
Audiences & Algorithmic Distribution
As AI-driven systems increasingly mediate discovery, news organizations must understand not only what they publish but how it travels and to whom. What strategies can we deploy to reach and retain audiences across fragmented platforms and diverse global markets?

Who Should Attend
This convening is for communications leaders navigating AI integration, developers building tools for journalism, researchers studying human-AI collaboration, entrepreneurs developing sustainable news models, and any professional interested in the civic technology ecosystem and the future of news.
“The most significant transformation that Media Party brings to its participants is the ability to forge lasting connections with unique players in the industry: media outlets, technologists, and global entrepreneurs. The sustainability and credibility of the media ecosystem must be accompanied by a network of shared relationships designed for the long term”, Mariano Blejman, Media Party director.
