NYU Media Talk Series

The Case for Media Optimism: What's Working and Why

Executives from AOL, Foursquare, Tumblr, and YouTube explore the business models, innovations, and the brave and bold strategies that have worked for the four major Web players, as well as forecasts and blueprints for future success in the latest NYU Media Talk event moderated by The New York Times media columnist David Carr. Hosted by The Center for Publishing at the NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the NYU Media Talk series presents public conversations with media leaders about trends in business from an industry insider’s viewpoint.
 

MODERATOR David Carr, media columnist, The New York Times As a writer and reporter for The New York Times, David Carr covers media and technology in the "Media Equation" column, which appears on Mondays in the business section. He also contributes to the Media Decoder blog for the newspaper and writes for the culture section. For four years, he blogged and made videos as "the Carpetbagger" for the Times during Oscar season. Previously, Carr was editor of the Washington City Paper and the Twin Cities Reader, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and New York magazines, as well as the media writer for Inside.com. Carr's bestseller, The Night of the Gun, was published in 2008. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota.

PANELISTS

Dennis Crowley, co-founder and chief executive officer, Foursquare

In 2007, Dennis Crowley co-founded Foursquare, a service that mixes social, location-based, and gaming elements to encourage people to explore the cities in which they live. Foursquare currently has 3.75 million users. His earlier start-up, dodgeball.com-one of the first mobile social services in the world-was acquired by Google in 2005. Crowley is currently an adjunct professor at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). He was named one of the "Top 35 Innovators Under 35" by MIT's Technology Review magazine in 2005 and won the "Fast Money" bonus round on the TV game show, Family Feud, in 2009. He has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time, and Newsweek. Crowley holds a master's degree from ITP and a bachelor's degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.


David Eun, president, AOL Media and Studios, AOL, Inc.

As president of AOL Media and Studios, David Eun oversees AOL's network of content sites, as well as the SEED.com publishing platform, the StudioNow
video platform, and AOL's New York City and Los Angeles studios. In this role, Eun is in charge of AOL's efforts to build a major large-scale journalistic organization. Eun joined AOL from Google, where he was responsible for global business development efforts in video, print, and local content businesses. Prior to joining Google in 2006, Eun helped to oversee AOL while working at Time Warner as vice president, Operations for the Media & Communications Group. Before joining Time Warner, he was a partner at Arts Alliance, a venture capital firm focused on digital media. Eun started his career in media at NBC and also worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company. Eun graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School.


David Karp, co-founder and chief executive officer, Tumblr

An early web innovator, New York-native David Karp began his career at age 17 as chief technology officer of UrbanBaby.com, which was acquired by CNET
in 2005. He then spent two years at the helm of his development firm, Davidville, before launching the publishing platform Tumblr.com. Tumblr gained an instant following among artists and new media influencers for its short-form blogging and community elements and its clean and easy to-use interface. Tumblr acquired funding in October 2007 from a number of investors, including Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Currently, Tumblr has 8 million users, 1.9 billion monthly page views, and an average of 5 million posts per day.


Steve Grove, head of news and politics, YouTube

Steve Grove directs the news and political content strategy and programming for YouTube. In 2008, Grove developed YouTube's political platform, which
brought presidential and congressional candidates to YouTube. He then launched the award-winning CNN/YouTube Debates, the first-ever Web-to-TV political debates in which candidates answered questions submitted on YouTube. Grove also brought President Obama to YouTube, posing user-submitted questions to the President in an exclusive interview in February 2010. Grove created partnerships with news organizations, developing products such as YouTube Direct (youtube.com/direct), that allow news organizations to access YouTube's vast market of citizen-generated news clips. He also started YouTube's nonprofit program, which allows charity organizations to harness YouTube for their causes. Originally from Northfield, Minnesota, Grove worked at The Boston Globe and ABC News prior to joining YouTube. Grove received a Master's in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2006. In December 2007, Newsweek named Grove one of its "12 people to watch," and in June 2009, Campaigns & Elections magazine listed him as one of the  Rising Stars of 2009." He blogs regularly at www.citizentube.com.