NEW YORK — Nonny de La Peña and Tom Grasty, creators of USC Annenberg-born Stroome, presented their project last week to an audience of CEOs, COOs and presidents of the world’s leading media companies at the Paley Center for Media’s International Council.

Their panel, “The Next Big Thing:  The New News Entrepreneurs,” was moderated by Jeff Jarvis, of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.  

Indeed, Stroome was among the news-oriented projects that were well received at the conference – even by those without a journalism background, Grasty said.

“The fact that Stroome came out of a journalism program was really resonating with them,” he said. “They really liked the idea that it came from someone like Nonny, who worked on the legacy side – with The New York Times – and then became one of the pioneers to transition to the digital side. And they loved the fact that it came out of USC, and we created it at Annenberg and then Annenberg came full circle and supported us so much.”

Grasty and de La Peña  built Stroome, an online video editing platform, for the Annenberg Program for Online Communities, a graduate program in new media, Internet marketing and online social networking.

 The media company leaders “really liked the fact that a journalism and communication school is walking the walk when they say they want to be pioneers and enable the future of digital journalism,” Grasty said.

Earlier this year, Stroome won a Knight News Challenge award, a two-year grant of $200,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. 

“Clearly Stroome is really poised to be one of the top new news platforms, de La Peña  said. “We’re poised to have enormous growth, and we’re excited to be delivering the next iteration with our Knight funding – and then watch it grow.”

Besides spreading the word about Stroome and building relationships with media leaders, de La Peña  said she benefitted from the prestigious conference in another important way. She heard something from Google's president of global sales operations and business development, Nikesh Arora, that will stick with her.

He said the company culture on innovation at Google is "let's try to find a way to say ‘yes.’"

“That’s something I took away – let’s try to say ‘yes,’” de La Peña  said. “It is such an inspiring leadership principle to apply to Stroome.”