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Center for Games & Impact

Brown Bag: Dan Gillmor, World of Newscraft

Event Release
Sept. 13, 2013

Please join the Center for Games & Impact for our September brown bag speaker event. This month we will hear from Dan Gillmor, Director for the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the ASU Walter Cronkite School for Journalism and Mass Communication.

Event Details

Eventbrite - September Brown Bag: Dan Gillmor, World of Newscraft

About Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor Dan Gillmor, an internationally recognized author and leader in new media and citizen-based journalism, is the founding director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and the Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism and Mass Communication.

Gillmor, a 1981 graduate of the University of Vermont, started his journalism career at the Valley Voice in Middlebury, Vt., before moving to the Times Argus in Barre-Montpelier, Vt. In 1984 he joined the Kansas City Times, where he became a regional correspondent, covering politics and the rural economy. During the 1986-87 academic year, he was fellow at the University of Michigan in what is now called the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellows program.

In 1988 Gillmor moved to the Detroit Free Press, where he covered transportation, regional affairs and technology. He was an early practitioner there of computer-assisted reporting, and became one of the first journalists at a traditional media company to use the Internet as part of his work.

Gillmor joined the San Jose Mercury News in 1994, writing a widely read column and blog that chronicled the dot-com revolution in Silicon Valley, and technology’s wider impact on policy and society. His blog is believed to have been the first by a journalist for a mainstream journalism organization.

In 2004 he published “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People,” a book on citizen journalism that has been published in many languages, most recently Korean and Arabic. The book is widely recognized as the first to explain how the collision of journalism and technology has democratized the creation of and access to media, and why it matters.

Gillmor published “Mediactive,” about digital media literacy in 2010. “My goal is to help people become active and informed users of media as consumers and as creators,” Gillmor said on the Mediactive Web site. “We are in a media-saturated age, more so all the time, and we need to find ways to use media to our — and our society’s — best advantage.”

In 2005 Gillmor left the Mercury News to work on grassroots media projects, including Bayosphere, a for-profit citizen-media effort that did not achieve critical mass and was eventually sold. He counts that failure as by far the most valuable learning experience of his career.

Subsequently, he has been an early-stage investor in several new media startups including Silicon Valley-based Wikia Inc., founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Seesmic, an online video company. Gillmor is co-founder of Helsinki-based Dopplr, a travel-related startup that was acquired by Nokia in September 2009. He also co-founded and continues to advise the Knight-funded Citizen Media Law Project.