Before becoming a journalist, Gillmor worked as a musician for seven years. During the 1986–87 academic year he was a Michigan Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. Gillmor worked at the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont, followed by six years at the Detroit Free Press. From 1994 to 2005, Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, during which time he became a leading chronicler of the dot-com boom and its subsequent bust. Starting in October 1999, he wrote a weblog for The Mercury News, which is believed to have been the first by a journalist for a traditional media company. Gillmor's eJournal archives were believed to be lost but have been found in the Internet Archive and are now restored at Bayosphere.com. Gillmor left The Mercury News in January 2005 to work on a start-up venture in citizen journalism called Bayosphere, which aimed to "make it easier for the public to report and publish on the Internet." Launched in May 2005, Bayosphere closed in January 2006. After closing Bayosphere, Gillmor moved on to a new project, the Center for Citizen Media, a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School. In 2007, Gillmor co-founded Dopplr, an online travel application project. In November 2007, Gillmor was named founding director of Arizona State University's new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Dan Gillmor is a board member of the Global Editors Network since its creation in April 2011. ;Awards and honors Gillmor won the EFF Pioneer Award in 2002.
Works
;Books Dan Gillmor is the author of We the Media, which describes the Internet as an opportunity for independent journalists to challenge the consolidation of traditional media and contains Gillmor's widely cited realization: "my readers know more than I do." The book offers a guide to new internet tools for journalists, including weblogs, RSS, SMS, peer-to-peer, and predicts how these tools will change journalism. In 2009, Gillmor published , a book on digital media literacy. ;Podcasts
recorded at Accelerating Change 2004, November 5–7, 2004.
