Cosmopolitan donates 30mln dollars

Cosmopolitan magazine's longtime editor Helen Gurley Brown is donating $30 million to Stanford and Columbia universities to create a bicoastal media "innovation laboratory."

The gift honors Brown's late husband, producer David Brown. He graduated from Stanford and from Columbia's journalism school, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation will be housed on both campuses.

Columbia Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann said Monday that the goal is to make technological advances that will have a lasting effect on journalism and other media.

David Brown, who died early last year was a Hollywood producer whose hits included "The Sting," "Cocoon" and "Driving Miss Daisy."

According to the Reuters each school will receive $12 million for the new institute. The gift to Columbia's Journalism School in New York, the largest in its history, will endow a professorship that will serve as the institute's east coast director.

Brown, 89, was editor from 1965 to 1996 at Cosmopolitan, a lively, sometimes racy, magazine aimed largely at single women during her tenure. She also has written several books, including the groundbreaking and popular "Sex and the Single Girl" in 1962.