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BOSTON (AP) - Boston University has landed New York Times media columnist David Carr to fill a new endowed chair dedicated to exploring creative business models to support digital journalism.
Carr, who starts in January, will keep writing for the Times but will spend two days a week at the university, where he will teach one class each semester in the communication college, the school announced.
The post appears to be among the first professorships dedicated to evaluating how media organizations can sustain themselves financially as readers and advertisers migrate to digital platforms, a crisis that has doomed some news organizations and threatens the viability of others. Carr has written about the issue extensively.
He will spend the spring semester preparing his courses and in the fall plans to teach a media criticism class and a hands-on class in which students will produce media and distribute it through social media and other platforms, he said.
"I think a lot of journalism education that is going on is broadly not preparing kids for the world that they are stepping into," Carr told The Boston Globe ( http://b.globe.com/1bzREFP). "It's a great time to be involved in journalism, but people have to be warmed up in the right way."
The professorship was created with a $1.66 million gift from Andy Lack, a 1968 Boston University graduate, a member of the board of trustees and chairman of Bloomberg Media Group, the university announced. The family of fellow trustee Alan Leventhal made a matching gift of more than $830,000.
The partnership was forged at a lunch involving Lack and Carr, at which Carr found he shared a rapport with the school.
"I do think the institutional aggression and the amount of ambition that they have there is a fit with how I run my show," he said.
Carr's classes will be aimed at graduate students but will also be open to undergraduate seniors, said Tom Fiedler, dean of the communications college.
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Information from: The Boston Globe, http://www.bostonglobe.com
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