Dan Gillmor

Expert on Citizen Media and the Internet

BIG IDEAS

• Mediactive: Why media consumers, not just creators, need to be active users
  Welcome to 21st century media—the era of radically democratized and decentralized creation and distribution, where almost anyone can publish and find almost anything that others have published. Welcome to the age of information abundance, and welcome to the age of information confusion. For many of us, that abundance feels more like a deluge, drowning us in a torrent of data, much of whose trustworthiness we can’t easily judge. You’re hardly alone if you don’t know what you can trust anymore.
  
  Drawing on findings from his latest book, Mediactive, Dan Gillmor explores the new rules for engagement within the media ecosystem–for both content creators and users. Dan’s proposal for making news useful to us, as citizens and consumers, is ambitious. He wants us to become mediactive—active users of media—to help us live up to the idea of literacy. Literacy, in any medium means not just know how to read that medium, but also how to create in it, and to understand the difference between good and bad uses.
  
  Dan offers a framework, first for thinking of ourselves as active consumers with the necessary virtues of skepticism and patience with complex stories, and with very practical guidelines for making judgments about the trustworthiness of stories and sources. His framework then extends to us as producers, offering a simple but informative guide to many of the ways that we can make our own media and put it out in the public, advising each of us to participate on the network and also have a home base online that we control. In furthering his commitment to the “active” part of being mediactive, Dan offers suggestions on how each of us can be a trustworthy source of information, beyond simply vetting others.
• We the Media
  The collision of media and technology has democratized media. The tools of creation are now in everyone's hands, and people have access to many more sources of media than ever before. This has created enormous challenges for traditional media of all kinds. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the entertainment industry, which has yet to fully understand, much less adapt to, the shift. Journalism, meanwhile, is undergoing an especially wrenching transformation, and not just in a business sense. As journalism shifts from a lecture to a conversation, all constituencies—journalists, newsmakers, and audiences—will have new rules and roles.
• New Rules for Newsmakers
  The old, top-down media world is evolving into a vastly more complex media ecosystem, and the result is a radically different environment for communications. Newsmakers—companies, politicians, institutions, celebrities—need to understand the conversation and then join it. A newsmaker has many constituencies, and the press is only one. People are using Web 2.0 tools of "citizen media," such as blogging, podcasting and discussion forums to talk about newsmakers. It's vital to join, not shun, those external conversations. But while engaging in other people's conversations is important, it's even more essential to use these same tools to do a better job with one's own communications.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Dan Gillmor is a leading authority on the phenomenon of media literacy and citizen journalism. As founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication he is a leader in the effort to help create a culture of innovation and risk-taking in journalism education, and in the wider media world. Dan also serves as the school's Kauffman Professor of digital media entrepreneurship.

One of the preeminent thinkers on the topic of new media, Dan brings deep knowledge of the collision of media and technology and its impact. His most recent book, Mediactive, explores 21st century media and the new rules for engagement in today's connected world. He is also the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, a book that explains the rise of citizens' media and why it matters. Dan is also a regular contributor to the Guardian.

Dan has been a co-founder, investor and advisor in a number of media ventures in the for-profit and non-profit worlds. He is a board member of the First Amendment Coalition, which advocates and litigates on behalf of freedom of speech and open public records.

Dan spent more than 25 years in the newspaper industry as a reporter, writer, and editor and remains a highly-respected journalist. For more than a decade, he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the San Jose 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 won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards.

A Closer Look at Dan

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Dan's current research agenda?

• Dan is passionate about media: how it is changing us and how we can use it to change ourselves and improve our society. He loves journalism and believes the cliches about how essential it is to a functioning democracy. He worries that we're losing the best journalism to a combination of business challenges and lowest-common-denominator programming.
• Dan’s primary agenda is in the "we media" arena—the democratization of media, in production and access; why it matters; how it works; what are the problems; and how we'll use it to achieve better media. His newest focus is on media literacy.

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Dan's expertise, and what's ahead on his schedule?

Dan speaks frequently with people in the media, education, and corporate spheres. His upcoming engagements include a research consultancy in Finland, a talk in Malaysia, and several public workshops. He is also a board member and advisor to a number of traditional and new media companies and nonprofits. In coming weeks he will be speaking on behalf of the U.S. State Department in Columbia and Russia.

In the past several years, Dan has delivered dozens of talks inside and outside the U.S., most related to citizen-media topics.

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Dan's must-read list?

Recent reads include:

Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger

In at the Death, by Harry Turtledove (alternate history)

The Gold Coast, by Kim Stanley Robinson

A History of God, by Karen Armstrong

Annual re-reading includes Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, which contain infinitely renewable wisdom.

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Dan tap into to feed his mind and fuel his creativity?

Industry events include FooCamp and events like Web 2.0. Dan also follows dozens of blogs and sites.

OUTREACH
What are Dan's pressing questions, and on which topics does he seek your feedback?

How can we turn the promise of democratized media into a reality of a more diverse and vibrant ecosystem, given the enormous pressures being brought to bear by powerful interests to rein in this emergent sphere?