AI in Media

William Bardeen is executive vice president and chief financial officer. He leads all of the company’s strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), investor relations (I.R.), financial planning and analysis (F.P.&A.), accounting, reporting, treasury, tax and audit activities. Will also oversees The New York Times print products and services operation.

Prior to becoming C.F.O. in July 2023, Will was senior vice president, chief strategy officer from 2018. He joined The New York Times Company in 2004 and has served in several strategy, corporate development, business development and finance roles for three chief executives. During that time, he helped transform the company from a traditional U.S. media conglomerate into a global digital subscription service, unified by the journalism and brand of The New York Times.

Before joining The Times, Will was a management consultant and worked with early-stage companies in the media and communications industry. He is a C.F.A. charterholder and began his career at the management consultancy A.T. Kearney in 1996.

Will graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1996 with an A.B. degree in environmental science and public policy. He received an M.B.A. in finance and economics from Columbia Business School in 2004.

A leading scholar on the EU’s regulatory power and a sought-after commentator on the European Union, global economy, and digital regulation, Anu Bradford coined the term the Brussels Effect to describe the European Union’s outsize influence on global markets. She is the author of The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020), named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. 

Her newest book, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, was published in September 2023. It was recognized as one of the best books of 2023 by Financial Times, and awarded the 2024 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

At the Law School, Bradford is the Director of the European Legal Studies Center. She is also a senior scholar at Columbia Business School’s Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business, and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Before joining the Law School faculty in 2012, Bradford was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She also practiced EU law and antitrust law in Brussels; and has served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland, and as an expert assistant at the European Parliament. The World Economic Forum named her Young Global Leader ’10. 

Bradford is a frequent keynote speaker at events hosted by universities, think tanks, international organizations, governments, and companies, in the United States and internationally. Her research and public commentary is regularly featured in top international news outlets, including The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

The faculty director of Columbia’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Jane C. Ginsburg is a renowned authority on intellectual property law and a staunch defender of authors’ rights. She teaches and writes about copyright law, international copyright law, legal methods, statutory methods, and trademark law. She is also the author or co-author of casebooks on all five subjects, including International Copyright: U.S. and EU Perspectives (with Edouard Treppoz) and Copyright: Cases and Materials (9th edition) (with Robert A. Gorman and R. Anthony Reese). Ginsburg was a co-reporter for the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law, Intellectual Property: Principles Governing Jurisdiction, Choice of Law, and Judgments in Transnational Disputes.

Fluent in French and Italian, Ginsburg has been a visiting professor at law schools and universities in France and Italy as well as in Australia, England, Israel, and New Zealand. She is a vice president of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, a Paris-based international organization created to promote and defend authors’ rights, and president of its U.S. chapter. She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome), a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

Jason Kilar is a technology and media executive/entrepreneur that has invested his career in the creation, building and scaling of companies that obsess over customers. Jason is currently - and quietly - building a new company with a number of his colleagues that comprised the founding team from Hulu. Previously, Jason served as the CEO of WarnerMedia (now called Warner Bros. Discovery). The businesses and brands that were under Jason’s leadership included Warner Bros., HBO, HBO Max (now called Max), CNN, DC, TNT, TBS, Turner Classic Movies and Warner Bros. Games, along with Warner’s retail, attractions and consumer products businesses. Kilar’s strategy as CEO of WarnerMedia took the company directly to consumers on a global basis, across entertainment, gaming, and news. Jason led the company during the launch and rapid global expansion of HBO Max (the service launched in 61 markets within 22 months). In 2020, HBO Max added more subscribers than HBO had added in the previous decade. Kilar’s tenure was in part defined by investment in the company’s storytelling, gaming, and technology businesses, resulting in the highest annual revenue (over $35 billion) in the 99-year history of the businesses that comprised WarnerMedia. 

Jason also served for 9 years in a variety of senior leadership roles at Amazon during its early years, running Amazon's books, music, and video businesses across North America. In 1997, Jason wrote the business plan for Amazon's entry into the video category. Jason was also responsible for Worldwide Application Software (which included Amazon's Marketplace businesses and the original designs for Amazon Prime and Fulfillment by Amazon). After Amazon, Jason became the founding CEO of Hulu, where he assembled a founding team and together they built and grew the new company into an award-winning service earning $1 billion in annual revenue by Hulu's 6th year. Today, Hulu is valued at over $25 billion. After departing Hulu in 2013, Jason co-founded and became CEO of Vessel, a next-generation online video service backed by Benchmark, Bezos Expeditions, and Greylock Partners. Vessel was acquired by Verizon Communications.

Jason began his career with The Walt Disney Company in 1993. He received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1997 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jason currently serves on the Boards of Roblox and Wealthfront and previously served on the Boards of Dreamworks Animation, Opendoor, Brighter, and Univision Communications. Jason is an active investor and advisor to early stage companies in Silicon Valley. Philanthropically, Jason serves on the Board of Trustees of Lick-Wilmerding School in San Francisco and has served on the Boards of Management Leadership for Tomorrow and Habitat for Humanity International. More important than any of the above, Jason is lucky to be married to his wife Jamie for 27 years and counting. They are doing the best they can to raise four good kids.
 

Kate Klonick teaches Property, Internet Law, and a seminar on information privacy. Klonick's research focuses on law and technology, most recently on private platform governance of online speech. 

Klonick's scholarly work has appeared in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, The Georgetown Law Journal, the peer-reviewed Copyright Journal of the U.S.A., The Maryland Law Review, and The Southern California Law Review. Her popular press writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Lawfare, Slate, Vox and numerous other publications.

Professor Klonick holds an A.B. with honors from Brown University where she studied both modern American History and cognitive neuroscience, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center where she was a Senior Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School. She clerked for Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York and Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit. She is an affiliated fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is on leave for 2022-2023 serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Rebooting Social Media Institute at Harvard University.

Professor Knee teaches Digital Investing and Media and Technology Mergers and Acquisitions, and co-teaches The Media and Technology Industries: Public Policy and Business Strategy with Professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School and Sports Economics and Policy with Professor Sunil Gulati of the Economics Department. He also serves as co-director of the Media & Technology Program with Professor Sarvary. 

Professor Knee is a Senior Advisor at Evercore Partners and has been an investment banker for over thirty years, previously at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post and he is the author of The Platform Delusion (2021) Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education (2017), co-author of Curse of the Mogul (2009) and author of The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade that Transformed Wall Street (2006)

Dan Wang is Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and (by courtesy) Sociology at Columbia Business School, where he is also the Co-Director of the Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change.  His research examines how social networks drive social and economic transformation through the analysis of global migration, social movements, organizational innovation, and entrepreneurship. He teaches the core MBA Strategy Formulation course, an elective MBA course on Technology Strategy, and a PhD seminar on Organizational Theory. In Executive Education, he co-directs the Executive Development Program, and teaches modules on Social Networks, Technology Strategy, and Business & Social Activism. He earned his BA from Columbia University (Columbia College) and PhD from Stanford University. 

Wang’s research lies at the intersection of business and society with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship, and how they are shaped by broader social forces such as global migration and social protest. His current work focuses on inclusive entrepreneurship to understand how novel organizational forms and tactics empower marginalized and disadvantaged groups to engage in venture creation and investment.  In addition, he has developed new work about the social and normative forces that govern the adoption of AI technologies within organizations and across society.

Hailed as the “architect” of the Biden administration’s competition and antitrust policies, Tim Wu writes and teaches about private power and related topics.  First known for coining the term “net neutrality” in 2002, in recent years Wu has been a leader in the revitalization of American antitrust and has taken a particular focus on the growing power of the big tech platforms. In 2021, he was appointed to serve in the White House as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy.

A professor at Columbia Law School since 2006, Wu has also held posts in public service. He was enforcement counsel in the New York Attorney General’s Office, worked on competition policy for the National Economic Council during the Barack Obama administration, and worked in antitrust enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission. In 2014, Wu was a Democratic primary candidate for lieutenant governor of New York. 

In his most recent book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (2018), he argues that corporate and industrial concentration can lead to the rise of populism, nationalism, and extremist politicians. His previous books include The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016), The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010), and Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (2006), which he co-authored with Jack Goldsmith. 

Wu was a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and also has written for Slate, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. He once explained the concept of net neutrality to late-night host Stephen Colbert while he rode a rollercoaster. He has been named one of America’s 100 most influential lawyers by the National Law Journal; has made Politico’s list of 50 most influential figures in American politics (more than once); and has been included in the Scientific American 50 of policy leadership.

Wu is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as a law clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.