Every year, the Brown Institute awards up to $1M in grants and fellowships — its “Magic Grant” program provides funding to develop a story idea or to pursue new technology that advances the way stories are found and told. In addition to funding, grantees have access to a distinguished advisory and mentoring group, and an extensive and inspiring alumni network.
Are you passionate about the role that emerging technologies can play in the future of media? Do you have a story that can only be told outside the scope of traditional media? A Brown Institute “Magic Grant” might be for you.
Since its founding in 2012, the Brown Institute’s “Magic Grants” have funded 150 people and over 50 projects. Previous grants include…
- A 360-video documentary on the famine in South Sudan, co-produced with PBS FRONTLINE.
- A database to collect and contextualize the reporting by the nearly 100 journalists killed in Mexico since 2000 — providing the history of the places where they lived, the social forces they faced, and the stories they told.
- A natural language processing algorithm that “reads” a news article and counts citations by gender — it is currently under trial at both the Financial Times and the New York Times.
- A series of deep audits of forensic DNA software, exploring and exposing important issues of algorithmic transparency that include both the mathematical description of an algorithm as well as its implementation in software.
- A new “urban storytelling” reportage, mixing illustration, analog data visualization and oral history, resulting in a portrait of NYC’s “canners,” people who pick up cans and bottles on the streets of NYC for a living, and published by NPR, The Gothamist and The Guardian.
- Experiments with natural and gestural (i.e., not a joystick) interfaces to drones.
- An open-source software infrastructure to explore and systematically analyze extremely large video collections — with a focus on examining the last decade of TV news.
- A prototype aid for science journalists as they assess a “breaking” research report — Is the topic timely? Is the report at the center or the periphery of a debate? And given the network of the authors, the report’s citations and the other scientists working in the field, who would make a good source for comments?
And the list goes on. You can see the 2018-2019 grants on this website.
From the Brown Institute:
We are looking for story proposals, new software platforms or even innovations in hardware. We are interested in projects that advance storytelling and journalism through original technology development. We also are interested in tools, technologies and stories that extend media broadly. A successful application clearly explains a unique story or technological advance and outlines a one-year (at most) plan for its realization or the creation of a prototype.
We welcome applications from teams of students, faculty, and alumni — as well as practitioners and researchers outside the university working in areas relevant to media and technology (e.g., journalism, communications and the digital humanities, as well as statistics, computer and data science, engineering, design and business).
Our applications are due April 8 and can be submitted at brown.submittable.com. If you are near the Columbia campus, we are having open office hours in the Brown Institute space Thursdays from 1-3 (book a session here).