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 and taking classes at NYU's Journalism Department. 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. Earning 1.7 million hits during the Spring 2009 semester, NYU Local has become the most trafficked news website at NYU and was recently profiled by PBS as a next generation publication.

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 grew into videos that have screened at Southern California film festivals and on New York City rooftops. He 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 facing modern journalism. He designed 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 newspapers are what hold our democracy together and that amid slashed budgets, lay offs, and pack journalism the industry is crumbling. In the newspaper business it has become commonplace to say the internet is killing journalism, but 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.