CODY BROWN

Tisch School of the Arts

Bachelor of Fine Arts, May 2010

Major: Film and Television

Bio and Resume (.pdf)

Cody Brown is majoring in Film with a minor in Journalism. He is working on a project that uses emerging technology to create a new model for online journalism. Cody is the founder and publisher of www.nyuLocal.com, the first daily campus newspaper in the United States built entirely online.

Cody’s interest in publishing began when he was reading The New York Times in a Denver coffee shop. The paper’s ability to succinctly draw readers into complex issues and important stories became an ideal for his work to follow. In high school, he became the editor of the school newspaper and in his senior year he founded and published a biannual magazine, Oko.

In Denver, Cody produced dozens of music videos and short films, making his television debut on PBS when he was 15 years-old. What started with simple animations turned into videos that would screen at Southern California film festivals and on New York City rooftops. Cody was also cast by Drew Barrymore in a VH1 pilot about next generation music video directors.

In his first semester at NYU, Cody received a first hand lesson in the problems undermining the future of journalism. He conceived and led a survey asking whether or not NYU students would trade their right to vote in the next presidential election for an iPod Touch. Once the results were out, the story was picked up by most major news outlets from around the country including Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and the Drudge Report. Almost every media outlet attacked the story from the same angle and re-packaged the results to make them seem more inflammatory.

Cody believes that newspapers are what hold our democracy together and amid slashed budgets, lay offs, and pack journalism the industry is crumbling. Many in the newspaper business have made claims that the internet is killing journalism while Cody believes that newspapers simply have not leveraged it effectively. By combining his passion for cinema with his interest in journalism, he plans to show them how.