An interview with Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor is a recognizable name and face in the emerging news ecology who teaches digital media literacy and digital media entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. He's attended several JTM gatherings, including the JTM News Tools event in the Silicon Valley. Gillmor's 2004 book *We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People* was described as "something of a bible for those who believe the online medium will change journalism for the better," by the the Financial Times. In 2010, Gillmor published *Mediactive*, a guidebook for improving digital media literacy. His next book, will look at "the increasing control that companies and governments are exerting over the way we use technology and communicate, and how we can take back some of that control." I recently had a chance to talk with Gillmor over the phone and have highlighted some of the things he said during our conversation. **On what's working:** I think it's great that there are so many experiments, but it's hard for me to point to any one in particular and say this is especially of note. There are a lot of terrific things going on out in the community. Mainly I've seen a lot of experiments, which is what I'm hoping to see: people trying lots of different things. **On what's missing:** One of the things that I still think needs to be done — and I haven't seen anyone do it — is to really put together a team to figure out what's going on outside of the journalism world that could have application to the journalism world. I constantly run across stuff in fields that don't appear to have any connection at all to journalism where it seems to me there would be pretty interesting possibilities if a technology or a technique were applied to a journalism space. It just feels to me like there's a lot of people going past each other or not even finding out about each other, which is often the case. There's not enough thinking about how the things that are being invented by non-journalists might be used by journalists. The cross fertilization that goes on in some of these hack days is a great start, but it's just not to the degree that I'd like to see. **On the future of advertising:** As other people have said in the past few years, there's no obvious connection between a local department store and journalism. It's been a coincidence of economic history that that has been the case, but it doesn't mean people shouldn't try, of course they should. It also means that advertising itself has a future, and I'm not convinced. There will be some future for it, but I'm pretty skeptical about advertising — as it currently exists — being a substantial media phenomenon for a lot of reasons. It's just not something that makes a lot of sense, unless you have a monopoly, and that's gone. **On Jeff Bezos purchase of the Washington Post and Pierre Omidyar's new news initiative:** I'll say it again and again, I'm thrilled that they are doing it. What's great about what they're all doing is that they're going to experiment and there's not been nearly enough of that in the traditional business, so I can't wait to see what they do. But I don't think we should oversell to ourselves what's going to be the likely outcome — given that the money they are going to spend is going to be in the category of rounding error for them. It is a lot for journalism and that's why I'm excited about it, but we shouldn't imagine that it's more than it is. **On Twitter:** The most conversation going on at the moment starts on Twitter. It doesn't end there, and people do take it elsewhere for more depth. I think it's both good and a little scary that they're locking up the conversation, and that they are a place where so much of this starts. It's a platform issue, I'm not crazy about a centralized platform that journalists don't control themselves being the place where they have their conversations with audiences. I think that's dangerous, but having said that I'm glad that it's going on. **On news organizations using Facebook for comments:** I think news organizations that have farmed their comments to Facebook are mind-boggling shortsighted. It's not a matter of real names. It's a matter of real moderation and putting in the work it takes to have a space where people can have good conversations. What news organizations have said is, "we couldn't be bothered to do it right, so we're just going to let our biggest competitor take over." I don't have any particular evidence that the conversations get all that much better by putting them on Facebook. There's a lot of trolling going on there. If a news organization cared enough it could have an online conversation going on that was not a rancid pool of toxic waste the way that some of them are. It's not impossible to do. It's moderation, and I use that word in several ways, but moderation matters. The news organizations that have given up have basically said to themselves and to their audiences, "we couldn't be bothered to run a place where people behaved like human beings. We couldn't be bothered so we're going to outsource it." I think a lot of them have made a conscious tradeoff understanding that they're giving something significant up to do it. All I'm saying is I think it's stupid. I think it's a big big mistake. **On Disqus:** It's a well-done product, but there's value in the conversations beyond having them. If you're thinking about a business and handing that over to people who are becoming or already are competitors, it just strikes me as lunacy. But that's what's going on. I don't think it's so hot that people want to use this data to data-mine their customers and turn them into the product — which is a lot of what goes on — but to have no control whatever seems, again, the word I keep coming up with is shortsighted. ***Postscript:*** *Gillmor has been celebrating the explosion of journalism experiments for nearly a decade. While the economic outlook for journalism looks better today than it did a few years ago, the fact that Gillmor couldn't immediately point to any exemplars shows that it will take more than ad-hoc experiments alone to escape this ongoing crisis of journalism.* *I was a bit surprised to learn of Gillmor's perspective on the Facebook comment platform. He's right about the value in conversations, but I'm not convinced that attaching real names to comments doesn't inhibit trolling to some degree. There are some particularly vile things people will usually only say anonymously.* *Finally, I really liked Gillmor's suggestion to look toward successes in other industries to find lessons for journalism, and we plan to expand the Illuminations Blog in that direction soon.* *Josh Wolf* *Editor-at-large* **Correction:** This article has been edited for clarity since its first publication.