Dan Gillmor
Scholar
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.
He writes articles and published a book called We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004; O’Reilly Media), and is working on a new book about media in the digital age called Mediactive.
In 2005 he worked on citizen media through Grassroots Media Inc.; he counts the business failure of Bayosphere, a new-media startup that aimed to fuel local journalism, as one of my best learning experiences.
From 1994-2005 he was a columnist at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News and 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. He has freelanced for the New York Times, Boston Globe, Economist, Financial Times and many other publications.
During the 1986-87 academic year he was a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I studied history, political theory and economics.
Before becoming a journalist he played music for seven years.