Partnership of the City, Polytechnic Institute of NYU and Columbia University Will Connect Media Companies with Academic Institutions and Drive Independent Technology Research

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today launched NYC Media Lab, a new initiative to promote innovation within New York City’s media industry. The new laboratory – a consortium of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) and Columbia University – will drive new technology research and connect companies looking to advance new media technologies with local academic institutions undertaking related research. NYC Media Lab builds on models established at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University and is the nation’s first government-supported laboratory for media innovation. It will be housed within the NYU Polytechnic Institute campus in Downtown Brooklyn. Mayor Bloomberg made the announcement at the Wired “Disruptive by Design” conference held at the Morgan Library and Museum, where he was joined by New York City Economic Development Corporation President Seth W. Pinsky, NYU-Poly Provost Dianne Rekow, Columbia University Vice President for Intellectual Property & Technology Transfer Orin Herskowitz, and AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong, an advisor to the City’s MediaNYC 2020 initiative.

“Many of New York City’s 100 universities and colleges are conducting new media-related research within areas that the City’s 10,000 media companies are looking to expand, but all too often that connection is made slowly or never at all. The NYC Media Lab will bring these two forces together,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “And by sponsoring its own independent research driven by private sector interests, the NYC Media Lab will further establish the City as a center for next-generation media research and commercial development.”

New York City Economic Development Corporation will provide $250,000 to establish NYC Media Lab, which will be located in Downtown Brooklyn at the NYU-Poly Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications and Distributed Information Systems. During its inaugural year it will host a minimum of 10 roundtable discussions between the private sector and academic institutions on topics ranging from technology innovation to business model redesign to legal issues. NYC Media Lab will host its first roundtable discussion this summer, focusing on the future of online and mobile video. The event, sponsored by WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, will bring together senior product and strategy leaders from across WPP’s portfolio of companies with faculty experts from Columbia, New York University and its Polytechnic Institute, who are currently engaged in research on the topic.

NYC Media Lab will connect private-sector businesses with research already underway, and develop collaborative research projects on topics vital to the City’s media industry such as: next generation search technologies; content format for digital mobile content; computer animation for film and gaming; emerging marketing techniques; and new devices currently in development that may affect content distribution. In addition, the NYC Media Lab will create a media research and development database comprised of university faculty; experts from corporations, not-for-profit research institutions, and R&D facilities throughout New York City; as well as contribute its own expertise to research currently being undertaken by the City’s academic institutions. It will also provide educational and networking services.

NYU-Poly will be responsible for management and operations of the NYC Media Lab, and Columbia University will coordinate involvement of its research faculty and faculty at other area institutions, and may contribute space for NYC Media Lab events. Divisions from area universities including New York University, the City University of New York, The New School, and Fordham University will be engaged to participate in the NYC Media Lab. And NYC Media Lab will develop a sponsorship and partnership structure to enable outside institutions to join the initiative. The NYC Media Lab will seek additional sponsors and members to support the expansion of its activities. Those looking for more information about NYC Media Lab can visit www.NYCMediaLab.org.

“The speed at which technology is evolving today means that our City’s academic researchers and media companies must work together to make sure that New York remains at the forefront of innovation,” said NYCEDC President Seth W. Pinsky. “By establishing this new Media Lab to facilitate these interactions, we increase the chances that the next great technology company will grow and thrive here, as opposed to Silicon Valley or elsewhere.”

“As technology and media increasingly converge, collaboration is essential to researching and identifying the best new IT solutions for New Yorkers,” said Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Carole Post. “The NYC Media Lab will provide the City valuable insights as it seeks to leverage academic and private sector expertise to address public sector issues.”

“NYU-Poly eagerly accepts the challenge to work with Mayor Bloomberg and New York City Economic Development Corporation to create the NYC Media Lab,” said President Jerry M. Hultin. “The NYC Media Lab is a prime example of academic entrepreneurship, a concept that we at NYU-Poly refer to as i-squared-e: invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. The NYC Media Lab will demonstrate that a university’s great ideas need not live only in laboratories but in the real world. The powerful combination of technology push from academia and market place pull from the City’s media leaders will transfer great research breakthroughs into new commercial products and processes.”

“Columbia enthusiastically embraced the challenge by Mayor Bloomberg and the City to join with our peer universities in New York on the MediaNYC 2020 task force,” said Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger. “With a Journalism School that trains leaders in the field, an Engineering School that helped develop FM radio, lasers and MPEG technology, and a Business School that is tackling the challenges of a changing media industry, we look forward to contributing a wide range of our intellectual capital to the NYC Media Lab. We share with the Mayor the firm belief that even in the most digital, disaggregated economy, New York City has unique advantages in creating a vibrant, entrepreneurial community where the next generation of media innovation can thrive.”

New York City is home to more than 100 colleges and universities, including nine academic research institutions that annually create over 600 inventions, produce nearly 200 new licenses and options, and generate over $500 million in licensing revenue. The City’s media sector employs more than 300,000 people and produces $30 billion in annual revenue. It also has a significant concentration of startups, many of which are in the new media sub-sector that is expected to expand significantly in the near term, with annual growth rates potentially surpassing 35 percent. Several of the City’s academic institutions currently undertake research on topics of interest to this sector; however, there has not been a facilitator to bring that research together with interested businesses. Many corporations at the intersection of media and technology, including WPP and AOL, are looking for ways to reach an expanding consumer base – including through expanded content distribution and hyper-local coverage – that may be supported by research currently being undertaken in New York City.

“New York City is the media capital of the world and today’s announcement by Mayor Bloomberg will ensure that it keeps that title as this industry continues to evolve and innovate,” said AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong. “The creation of the NYC Media Lab is the perfect collaboration between the private and public sectors and academia to realize the potential of homegrown innovations in this space. At AOL, we recognize the talent, resources and entrepreneurial spirit that’s alive here in New York. Earlier this year, we launched our own New York Technology Center with a goal of bringing more engineering into the content business – and making the Internet even more useful than it is today. We’re delighted to join with the Mayor on this announcement and look forward to working with the consortium on the Lab.”

NYC Media Lab will build upon initiatives already launched by the City to foster the creation of new media businesses and technologies and develop and train the sector’s workforce. These include: a network of business incubators for startup companies; the release of City data for software developers and programmers to create digital mobile applications; a seed and early-stage investment fund for technology businesses; a series of workshops to assist startups and small businesses in applying for City IT Contracts and federal research grants; and JumpStart and FastTrac programs to provide support to entrepreneurs launching or growing businesses in New York City.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stu Loeser/Andrew Brent   (212) 788-2958

David Lombino/Libby Langsdorf (Economic Development Corp.)   (212) 312-3523

Kathleen Hamilton (NYU Polytechnic Institute)   (718) 260-3792

Holly Evarts (Columbia University)   (212) 854-3206

…thought you might interested this article from BNET about a new community news/hyperlocal company called Main Street Connect.  The founder of the company, Carll Tucker, talks in the article about how he got inspired to start the company and how it is different from other hyperlocal ventures in the space.

Here is the link to the article- http://blogs.bnet.com/smb/?p=558

…Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

-CShirky read the entire post on Shirky’s blog.

Baltimore, MD (PRWEB) August 25, 2009 — Tewspaper, an online newspaper without writers, has launched with coverage of five major metropolitan cities – Baltimore, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Tewspaper scours social media websites such as Twitter and filters messages down to breaking news. One of the local sites, Baltimore News, brings algorithmically filtered news to people in Tewspaper’s home town.

Tewspaper is neither endorsed nor sponsored by Twitter or other social media websites; the company uses publicly available APIs to connect with social media sites and find relevant data. One of Tewspaper’s innovations is a system of filtering through the obscure and finding the relevant news on social media sites. For example, Twitter alone has over 2 billion messages, and is growing by thousands of messages per minute. Tewspaper makes it easy to find out what is happening now, in an organized, succinct, and accessible fashion. It is an ideal way for the Internet generation, who text and tweet, to view the news at their rapidly moving pace.

“We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter. From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find additional breaking news from anyone on Twitter and other websites as it happens,” said Jared Lamb, the creator of Tewspaper.

Another obstacle Tewspaper had to overcome was the limited content it could locate for each story. To solve this problem, the website automatically matches images to related stories. Tewspaper determines the optimal image to display for every story based upon the author, subject, headline text, date, links, and other context.

Other local editions are available for Chicago News, Los Angeles News, Dallas News, and New York City News.

###

Contact Information
Jared Lamb
Tewspaper
http://www.tewspaper.com
443-857-4829

NPR NEWS SPECIAL COVERAGE OF LIFE, CAREER
OF SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY

NPR OFFERING TWO HOUR-LONG SPECIALS TODAY AT 2PM AND 7PM,
CONTINUING COVERAGE THROUGHOUT THE DAY ON-AIR AND AT NPR.org

August 26, 2009; Washington, D.C. – NPR News will offer two special programs today looking at the life and career of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who died last night of complications related to a cancerous brain tumor. Both specials will be broadcast on NPR Member stations nationwide, and will be streamed live at NPR.org. For local stations and broadcast times, visit NPR.org/stations.

From 2:00PM to 3:00PM (ET), NPR congressional correspondent Andrea Seabrook will host an hour-long call-in special. Seabrook will interview guests about Kennedy’s life of service and influential career in the Senate, and invite questions from the audience. Guests include Congressman Barney Frank, former U.S. Senator John Sununu, professor and scholar Ronald Walters and Thomas Oliphant, who covered Kennedy for 40 years for the Boston Globe. Listeners may join the conversation by calling (800) 989-8255 or sending an email to talk@npr.org

Beginning at 7:00PM (ET), NPR will explore Kennedy’s life – his role as a legislative lion in the Senate; his focus on civil rights, and on fighting for the disenfranchised; and his personal life and struggles – in an hour-long program. Host Linda Wertheimer will be joined by a roundtable offering political analysis on the legacy Kennedy leaves behind, with legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, senior news analyst Juan Williams, health policy correspondent Julie Rovner and political editor Ken Rudin.

In addition to these specials, NPR will continue to cover the breaking news of Kennedy’s death throughout the day on all of its news programs, and online at NPR.org, where there is a complete obituary, a timeline of Kennedy’s life and archival interviews with the late senator.

-NPR-

Read the entire article here

npr

WHITE HOUSE NEWS PHOTOGRAPHERS ASSOCIATION BESTOWS “THE EYES OF HISTORY” AWARDS ON NPR JOURNALISTS

February 25, 2009; Washington, D.C. – NPR News has earned 18 honors in the 2009 White House News Photographers Association’s The Eyes of History awards.  The annual awards, announced earlier this week, recognize outstanding achievements in photojournalism.

NPR journalists were recognized in 12 separate categories, more than any other broadcast news media, with three first place awards in the following categories: New Media’s “Best Use of Photography and Audio with Narration,” Still Photography’s “Best Picture in Story/Politics,” and Video Editing’s “Sports.”

The awards will be presented at a White House News Photographers Association gala in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 2009, where the award-winning photographs and videos will be displayed.

The Eyes of History awards honoring the best in photojournalism were established as an annual contest in 1941 by the White House News Photographers Association, founded 20 years earlier.  The awards provide a historical look back on the year, with photos portraying compelling, interesting and memorable coverage of events in Washington and around the world.

Awards won by NPR are outlined below.  To view NPR’s winning entries visit: http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2009/02/whnpa_contest_winners.html

A complete list of NPR’s 2009 “Eyes of History” awards follows:

MULTIMEDIA
Best Use of Photography and Audio (narration)
1st Place
Crafting China’s Future Champions
Produced by: Andrea Rane, Jessica Wanke and Coburn Dukehart/NPR; Audio Produced by Jack Zahora/NPR; Reported by Louisa Lim/NPR; Photographs by Ariana Lindquist for NPR.

3rd Place
From The Iraq War, A Troubled Romance In America
Produced by Andrea Rane/NPR; Reported by Ivan Watson/NPR; Photographs by Paxton Winters for NPR

Award of Excellence
A Walk Through Beijing’s Vanishing Hutongs
Produced by Coburn Dukehart/NPR, Edited by Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR; Reported, photographed and narrated by Frank Langfitt/NPR

STILL PHOTOGRAPHY
Best Picture Story – Politics
1st Place
A Civil Rights Activist Votes in Birmingham
David Gilkey/NPR

Pictoral
Award of Excellence
Gaza
David Gilkey/NPR

VIDEO
News Special Reports
3rd Place
Afghan Dispatches
David Gilkey/NPR

Feature
Award of Excellence
Dreaming Green in Ukraine
David Gilkey/NPR

Video Documentary
2nd Place
Project Song: Nellie McKay
John Poole and David Gilkey/NPR

Sports Video
3rd Place
A Good Throw
John Poole/NPR

Political Video
2nd Place
New Hampshire Campaign Goes Door To Door
David Gilkey/NPR

Lighting
3rd Place
Lighting Composite
David Gilkey/NPR

Audio
1st Place
A Good Throw
John Poole/NPR

3rd Place
Voices from the Front
David Gilkey/NPR

Editing Short Form
Award of Excellence
Burned in the War
John Poole/NPR

Editing Long Form
1st Place
Project Song: Nellie McKay
John Poole/NPR

Editing – Sports
1st Place
A Good Throw
John Poole/NPR

3rd Place
Afghan Olympian
David Gilkey/NPR

Audio Editing
Award of Excellence
Project Song: Nellie McKay
John Poole/NPR

-NPR-

I am happy to see NPR expanding from audio into web / multimedia reporting. I look forward to more.

And, congratulations to NPR for showing that quality journalism is possible without a printed product.

“…we’ve reached an interesting point in our project’s growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we’re open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That’s a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock’s philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?

We have a number of ideas for sustaining our project beyond a dependency on grants, like building a local advertising engine and/or selling hosted versions of the open-source software, but we’re sure there are other ways for EveryBlock to be a successful business. That brings me to the reason I’m posting this — we’re looking for ideas and partners who would be interested in helping us figure this out. If you have any ideas or suggestions, get in touch with me. I’m confident we’ll make something happen; it’s just a matter of how.”

How do I think EveryBlock can become economically sustainable?

1. Gannett or Advance Publications buys the services of the entire EveryBlock team to incorporate EveryBlock into their news sites.  Most importantly the team is tasked with creating logical, simple, cheap ad placement on news sites.   The Code remains open source.

2. Go the Firefox route and partner with Google to make their search the default search on EveryBlock. Make millions a year, remain open source.

3. Partner with Apple to to have Everyblock preloaded onto every iPhone and iPod.  This frees Apple up from using popular Google apps like Maps and Yahoo apps like Local. This make even more money when partnered with the applestore.

4. Go the WordPress route and offer consulting and other services.

5. If anyone knows how to make money online it is Amazon.com.  Maybe they can use EveryBlock for geo-tagging their products and services.

6. Make Weichert or some other huge realtor the default real estate search for EveryBlock.

7. Offer EveryBlock and EveryBlog (currently taken by drupal)  franchises to locals looking to get into publishing.

Lastly, I just want to mention that in its current iteration, Everyblock is extremely impersonal and that adding or partnering with content producers like blogs or news sites could add real value via increased community participation.

I’m sure there are others.  Share your ideas!

The Metaprinter News Aggregator is currently tracking the 27 newspaper blogs and news sites listed below (in no particular order). 

1. PBS.org’s IdeaLab
2. NAA Digital Edge Blog
3. OnTheMedia.org
4. Metaprinter.com
5. PressThink
6. BuzzMachine
7. ContentBridges.com
8. Financial Times Media
9. Yahoo Finance: Publishers-newspapers
10. Doc Searls Weblog
11. MondayNote
12. Rob Curley
13. Nieman Lab
14. Poynter.org
15. NY Times Media
16. RoughType
17. TimWindsor.com
18. Seth Godin
19. PrintCEOBlog
20. Cnet News – The Social
21. Newsosaur
22. Mashable
23. A List Apart
24. Fitz&Jen
25. TechCrunch
26. Gannett Blog
27. CJR.org

All the headlines from those sites are continuously updated throughout the day and displayed on one single page at news.metaprinter.com.  Notice too that there is a sharing / bookmarking button at the top of the page to make those experiences easier.

Check it out and tell me what you think.  I’m looking to add some sites to the page, particularly sites which track media advertising, online advertising, and new media trends.  As well as remove some sites which may become less dynamic.  If you would like your site added to the page send me an email and link for consideration.

The purpose of metaprinter.com and news.metaprinter.com is to make following, sharing, and discussing news media innovation and convergence a more wholesome experience.

Cheers,

Robert Ivan
info [at] metaprinter [then a dot] com

“The Post plans to publish a total of 1.72 million copies of morning and afternoon editions on Jan. 20 and 21, all for street sales, according to Mike Towle, director of retail and corporate sales.”

Wow.  That’s 1.72 million single copy sales on top of their regular issue for a total of 2.7 million newspapers over the course of 2 days.  Who’s going to clean up that mess?

The newspapers are going for $2 a pop… it just seemed like a nice round number.  I’m predicting early success (photos of the masses holding up “Obama sworn in” newspapers) followed by massive failure (photos of littered newspapers everywhere) inadverdently reinforcing the notion that newspapers are bad for the environment (regardless of how true this is).

Flip the script – or,
The photos appearing everywhere on the internet from inauguration are the masses holding up their Blackberries in a show of solidarity.  we’ll see…