Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Center, funded by the Knight Foundation and Kauffman Foundation, is working to help create a culture of innovation and risk-taking in journalism education, and in the wider media world.
He recently authored a book entitled, Mediactive. His goal with this project is to help turn passive media consumers into active users — as participants at every step of the process starting with what we read.
Mr. Gillmor frequently writes articles, including occasional pieces at Salon.com, one of the pioneering web-based news organizations, and more frequently at the Mediactive blog. His last book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004 and 2006; O’Reilly Media), is still on the market and still selling. The book has been translated into many foreign languages, most recently Korean and Arabic.
Mr. Gillmor serves on the board of the First Amendment Coalition and Pen Plus Bytes. He also helped found Dopplr, a travel site and “social atlas” that was recently purchased by Nokia.
Mr. Gillmor frequently speaks at events, public and corporate. In the past several years I’ve spoken in front of organizations including: Schibsted (Norway), ABC (Spain), TVN (Chile), Clarin (Argentina), Consumer Electronics Association (US), International Prepress Association, TIDE (Germany), Newspaper Association of America, Knight Center for Digital Media, National Association of Science Writers, New York Press Association, BlogBoat (Belgium), the University of Colorado, and Columbia University. He has also gone to Russia, Columbia and Egypt on behalf of the U.S. State Department, giving talks and workshops for journalists and new-media people and promoting the ideas behind citizen media.
From 1994-2005 Mr. Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and he wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. The blog is believed to have been the first by a journalist for a traditional media company. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. Over the years he has freelanced for the New York Times, Boston Globe, Economist, Financial Times and many other publications.
During the 1986-87 academic year Mr. Gillmor was a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics.
