launch

1411063313381 — Mashable Executive Editor and Chief Content Officer Jim Roberts (center) with M.S. in Publishing students

The doors to the elevator opened to display an office that is sleek, stylish, and largely white, with touches of the famous Mashable blue. Shiny, long, chalk-hued tables serve as desks, conversation booths are for impromptu meetings, and conference spaces are named after movie settings (East and West Egg from The Great Gatsby, The Wardrobe from The Chronicles of Narnia). Did we mention a dedicated space for Google Hangouts, a state-of-the-art video studio, and a high-tech kitchen replete with a Soda Stream? There is also the obligatory ping pong table, the new must-have at digital media companies. Mashable’s offices have a really chic and futuristic look to them, which provides a fresh and fun, but professional, ambiance. Employees enjoy the good digital life as they select the best content for the site that promises “viral content before it goes viral.” [Read more…] about Mashable Magic: Grumpy Cat and Gripping News

Zinczenko and Leive at NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute

I’d wager there’s at least one kid in every city who dreams of making it big in New York. While a fair few aspire to Broadway stardom, our kind imagines something slightly more bookish, although undoubtedly as enchanting.

Our kind is the readers, the writers, and the would-be editors and publishers. We grew up checking out too many books from the library, using our allowances at Barnes & Noble, staying up way past midnight to read the new Harry Potter book, and just generally spending hours (possibly days) with our faces buried in text. While for some, this process may have manifested itself in a less-pronounced fashion, 116 of us applied and were accepted to the Summer Publishing Institute at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. At SPI, as we call it, we’ve now found ourselves eagerly immersed in one of the most intense summers of our lives. [Read more…] about SPI Day One: Passion, Power Editors, and Russian Poetry