Cosmo’s Brown donating $30M to Columbia, Stanford

NEW YORK — 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 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.

Helen Gurley Brown wrote the 1962 best-seller “Sex and the Single Girl” and edited Cosmopolitan from 1965 to 1996. She turns 90 in February.

David Brown died in 2010. He was a producer of Hollywood hits including “Jaws” and “Driving Miss Daisy.”