Dan Gillmor moves on, creates Center for Citizen Media

Updated

While in London, we bumped into Dan Gillmor, our former colleague and well-known columnist at the Mercury News.

He hinted something was up, and now it is official.

He is moving on from the for-profit mission at Bayosphere, and is instead creating a non-profit Center for Citizen Media, which will live at UC Berkeley and Harvard.

(Correction: Dan just got back to us. He tells us he is “in the process of deciding what to do with Bayosphere,” and that our wording “moving on” goes beyond what is correct to say right now.)

Here is his post, in his own words.

A snippet:

Starting in 2006, I’ll be putting together a nonprofit Center for Citizen Media. The goals are to study, encourage and help enable the emergent grassroots media sphere, with a major focus on citizen journalism.

I’m thrilled and honored that the center will be affiliated with two superb universities in a bi-coastal partnership.

Here on the Pacific Rim, where I live, the center will collaborate with the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. As an I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow, I’ll do a class next fall, and my principal physical office will be at Berkeley as well.

Our Atlantic-facing partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School, where I’ll be a Research Fellow. I’ll visit there regularly — at least once a month — to work with other fellows, faculty and students.

Perhaps the business model of a for-profit citizen media project wasn’t clear enough.

We’re glad for Dan that he gets to continue his mission at such esteemed institutions.