As nearly everyone knows, Dan Gillmor has moved to the entrepreneurial world, and I’m tickled he’s out here in the wild now, figuring out his next thing and just hanging it out and seeing what might come. Today there’s news that he has been appointed a fellow at Stanford Law’s Center for Internet & Society, and is organizing a conference on the idea of the citizen journalist. At the end of the day, I sense that the citizen journalist equates with my fundamental definition of a journalist, regardless of credentials: a person who both has the talent and the desire to report, investigate, question, and care about something that others in a community also care about. As an industry and over time, we may have forgotten this fundamental truth, but I see it every time I teach at Berkeley – students with an itch to communicate what they see, regardless of the outcome. Given the fall of icons such as CBS and the NYT, it’s a good thing that we can still honor such an impulse in our culture, and I look forward to seeing what Dan will do next.
