Dan Gillmor

Journalist, teacher, innovator

Dan Gillmor teaches journalism at Arizona State University. In 1981, Gillmor graduated from the University of Vermont and later pursued a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during the 1986-87 academic year, focusing on history, political theory, and economics.

From 1994 to 2005, Gillmor wrote a column for the San Jose Mercury News. During this period, he pioneered blogging for SiliconValley.com. Prior to his role at Mercury News, Gillmor spent six years with the Detroit Free Press, worked with the Kansas City Times, and several newspapers in Vermont.

In 2008, Gillmor joined Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication as a professor of practice. Over the past decade, he has focused on media literacy, reflected in his 2009 book "Mediactive." In 2017, Gillmor co-founded the ASU News Co/Lab, an experimental lab collaborating with others to enhance the information ecosystem. Additionally, he contributes articles and commentary for Slate Magazine’s Future Tense, Nikkei Asia, and Medium.

Beyond academia, Gillmor is an investor in Wikia (known as Fandom), a privately held consumer wiki company co-founded by Jimmy Wales. As a board member of the Signals Network (a nonprofit committed to protecting whistleblowers and connecting them to journalism organizations), Gillmor actively supports transparency and accountability. He is also an advisor to the Interlink Academy, an international professional institute for journalists.

His non-fiction book, "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People" (published by O’Reilly Media), has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, and Arabic. Notably, the Japanese magazine Aera featured Gillmor on its cover when the book was first published in Japan.