A year and change after announcing his departure from the San Jose Mercury News, Dan Gillmor announced the formation of the Center for Citizen Media yesterday, a nonprofit think tank with a focus on the “grassroots media sphere” and “citizen journalism.” The center starts out with two partnerships–one with Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and one with Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. That also makes Dan a double fellow–an I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow (Berkeley) and a Research Fellow (Berkman).
Institutional support from organizations like the Center for Citizen Media won’t singlehandedly make or break the case for citizens being taken seriously as part of the global flow of news, but it will raise the profile of citizen journalism and bring some much needed balancing perspectives to discussions of the rights of bloggers. This is very good news indeed.