Dan Gillmor is a leading authority on the phenomenon of media literacy and citizen journalism. In January 2008, he was appointed director of a new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In that capacity, he is leading 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.

Additionally, Dan is founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. The center is an affiliate of ASU and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School.

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. He is 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 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.

BIG IDEAS

1. We the Media
   

2. 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.
   

1. New Rules for Newsmakers
   

2. 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.
   

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4. Media Literacy 2.0
   

5. In a media-saturated age, when people are creators and not just consumers, we need more sophisticated media literacy. Think of it in terms of principles, which differ somewhat depending on the role one is playing in the media ecosystem. For consumers—and even media creators are more often members of an audience—the principles are: skepticism, trust, understanding media techniques, and digging deeper. For journalists, “amateur” or professional, they are: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, independence, and transparency.