Creator of Science Web Site Wins Award
COM alum funds $10K media studies competition
Joseph Caputo (COM’09) has won the first Harold G. Buchbinder Entrepreneurial Media Studies Competition, which comes with a $10,000 grant, for his creation of a new Web site, www.sciencemetropolis.com.
Sponsored and funded by Brian Cohen (COM’78), the new competition presents full-time College of Communication graduate students with the opportunity to create, research, and develop a business plan supporting innovative products and services in the media and/or communications field.
Cohen devised the competition to encourage students to recognize the power they have within them to create new businesses, and to honor his longtime mentor, the late Harold G. Buchbinder, a COM science and medical journalism professor. Cohen hopes to inspire students to realize their dreams, just as Buchbinder inspired him to realize his.
“This is the first entrepreneur competition at a communications school in the United States. With the ongoing torrent of reinvention in the media business,” says Cohen, “it’s more important than ever before to rouse these young minds to think creatively and execute new businesses ideas.”
One of four competing entries, Caputo’s Web site is a blog that supports visitor interaction — both in the digital and the physical world — and aims to be an online community for “science hobbyists” in the Boston and Cambridge area.
“My focus is local science; there is so much going on in Boston,” says Caputo. “My science isn’t for scientists; it is for science hobbyists — for people who like watching a documentary on TBS or people who enjoy going to science museums and just like to talk about it.”
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