Mayor Mike Throws a Bone to Silicon Alley

Uncle Sam may have stepped up earlier this year to help Wall Street, but it looks like it’s going to be Mayor Mike giving New York’s Chattering Class a boost. Well, actually it’s more of a ‘help you help us help the city’ sort of arrangement.

Bloomberg took the podium at Barry Diller’s IAC headquarters in Chelsea today to announce new initiatives to help New York by creating 8,000 new-media jobs in the next 10 years. Plans include [from Crain’s]:

• Something called JumpStart New Media, “a boot camp retraining program for traditional media professionals looking to restart their careers on the digital side. The program will train 50 participants per month, and offer unpaid 10-week apprenticeships at new media companies.” Because every out-of-the-job 30-something media professional could use an unpaid internship right now.

• A 5,000-square-foot ‘freelancer hive’ on Broad Street — a good use for the acres of space sitting empty in the Financial District.

• Also, a $1 to $10 million bond program to help companies upgrade their offices and infrastructure for digital media work; a Media Lab to get corporate dollars behind academic new media research; and a NYC BigApps Competition to gather ideas for new-media uses of publicly available city data.

More at City Room and WSJ.

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