The Centennial Campaign
We are living in a time of extraordinary challenge and opportunity that puts the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in a position to make an enormous positive difference in shaping the future of journalism. As we head into our Centennial, we seek to accomplish goals that we have not yet realized. These include:
Full-need financial aid. We have a highly diverse and global student body, whose members we are preparing for a modestly paying profession. We need to attract the very best students regardless of their economic circumstances. You make this possible through your gifts to the Annual Fund. Every gift counts, every year.
Now we have an opportunity to have an even greater impact on financial aid. Endowed financial aid gifts of $100,000 or more are available for a match from the estate of the late John Kluge, which means that each dollar pledged will have more than a dollar’s effect.
Digital Journalism. Journalism’s most significant development right now is the digital revolution. Using our fortunate position to do as much as we can to help lead this historic transition in journalism is the school’s number-one task at this moment.
In the fall of 2010, thanks to a number of generous gifts led by one from Leonard Tow, we opened our Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and hired one of the world’s leading practitioners of digital journalism, Emily Bell of The Guardian, as a faculty member and the center’s first director.
We are seeking support for Tow Center research that will be directly applicable to a profession undergoing rapid change, to bring the best minds and fresh ideas from journalism and other disciplines together to develop projects that can help create new ways of reporting and presenting the news, and to devise a new curriculum for our students, drawing upon what we learn from our research and our work with professionals.
And we are putting what we are learning about digital journalism to work. We are launching a new year-round local news Web site, called The New York World in tribute to Joseph Pulitzer’s paper whose success produced the resources that endowed our school and the Pulitzer Prizes.
New York World’s focus is on producing accountability journalism about the performance of state and local government for a broad New York readership.
We aim to help fill a gap in news coverage and to raise the level of the school’s journalistic practice.
At the watershed moment of our centennial, there is no place as well positioned as the Columbia Journalism School to lead in all these areas at once. Please support the Annual Fund, and contact us to find out how else you can support the Columbia School of Journalism.