No Town For Corn: what NYC media czar’s legacy means for Brooklyn

When Mayor Bloomberg took over City Hall, the Office for Film, Broadcasting, and Theater was operating on typewriters. He brought in Katherine Oliver who turned it around and revitalized the whole media strategy for the city. It’s detailed in a new story from Fast Company.

Here are some of the specific ways that Oliver’s work has benefited Brooklyn:

• The Brooklyn College Graduate School of Cinema
• Facilitating the establishment of Steiner Studios as an essential support infrastructure
• A new backlot at Steiner with replicas of New York neighborhoods
• Coming up with the idea for a Chief Digital Officer
• Launching Dumbo’s New York Media Center, which is bringing General Assembly to Brooklyn and Questlove helped open.

The outgoing Mayor explained to Fast Company his reasons for making media a priority for New York:

NYC is a place that competes on intellectual capital–if you want to grow corn, we’re not the place for you. We want jobs for the people here with salaries and benefits that let them share in the American dream. We want to attract industries with high profit margins so our employees can get paid, and media is part of that. It’s the way the rest of the world sees NYC. It was a logical thing to do.

[Fast Company]