Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Center, funded by the Knight Foundation and Kauffman Foundation, is working to help create a culture of innovation and risk-taking in journalism education, and in the wider media world.

Also director at the Center for Citizen Media, originally a joint project of the University of California-Berkeley School of Journalism and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Fellow at Berkman from 2006-2009 and now a Faculty Associate); the Center for Citizen Media is now affiliated with ASU but is pretty much dormant.

Dan is also author of several articles and We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004; O’Reilly Media) book which has been translated into many foreign languages, most recently Korean and Arabic.

Other media investments; media-related boards and advisory boards membership :

* Co-founder, Dopplr, a travel site and “social atlas”.
* Investor, Wikia, a privately held consumer wiki company (Jimmy Wales, founder, is a member of the Center for Citizen Media Board of Advisors)
* Investor, Seesmic, a privately held company that does Twitter applications and online video
* Shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway (owner of the Buffalo News and major shareholder in the Washington Post Co.), and Amazon.com
* Board member, First Amendment Coalition
* Advisor, FON, a collaborative Wi-Fi company
* Advisor, Global Voices Online, a nonprofit
* Advisor, Spot.us, a startup working on new journalism business models
* Advisor, Publish2.com, a site aggregating journalists’ links and ideas
* Advisor and co-founder, Citizen Media Law Project, a Berkman-based (and Knight-funded) project

From 1994-2005 Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com, first by a journalist for a traditional media company. He has worked with  Detroit Free Press, Kansas  City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. Over the years,  freelanced for the New York Times, Boston Globe, Economist, Financial Times and many other publications.

Before becoming a journalist he played music for 7 years.