Requiem for a Think Tank: The Life and Death of the Gannett Center at Columbia, 1984-1996

For twelve years, the Gannett Center for Media Studies (subsequently named the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center) operated a unique media “think tank” billed as “the nation's first institute for the advanced study of media and technological change” at Columbia University. It attracted leading professionals and scholars to its fellowship, technology, and media research programs. The result was a distinctive interaction between media industries and the academy that produced many major books, studies, and other intellectual products including a journal that informed the media-society relationship. A joint venture of a university and a media foundation with special links to journalism education and media industries in the United States and internationally, the program decamped from Columbia in 1996 and was phased out two years later.