J. D. Lasica

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J. D. Lasica is the byline of Joseph Daniel Lasica, an online journalist and blogger. He is the author of Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation (ISBN 0-471-68334-5) (2005), a book about the copyright wars and the future of media.

Lasica was born on July 27, 1955, in Passaic, New Jersey. He graduated from high school in Elmwood Park, New Jersey in 1973. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1977, where he holds a BA in communication.

He began working in journalism as a reporter for the Passaic Herald News, then held several editing positions at the Sacramento Union and Sacramento Bee in California. He left newspapers in 1997 when he joined Microsoft's Sidewalk.com city guide as copy chief and managing editor. In 1999 he joined BabyCenter.com, a site for new and expectant parents in San Francisco, as managing editor and then editorial director. He worked briefly as Director of Content and Production for iVendor in Sunnyvale, California, before the Silicon Valley startup folded in late 2000.

From 1997 to 2005, Lasica wrote dozens of free-lance articles for publications such as the American Journalism Review, where he was its first new media columnist; the Online Journalism Review, where he was its chief columnist; and the now-defunct Industry Standard magazine. In 2003 Lasica was editor of the white paper We Media: How Audiences Are Shaping the Future of News and Information, published by the Media Center at the American Press Institute. From 2004 to 2005 he was a columnist for Engadget, a technology blog. His book "Darknet" came out in May 2005.

In March 2005 he co-founded Ourmedia, a grassroots media community and learning center, and serves as its chief executive. He is also president of the Social Media Group, a consulting firm. In February 2007 the Aspen Institute published his report The Mobile Generation: Global Transformations at the Cellular Level.^[1]

Lasica is a well-known citizen journalist, lecturing widely on the subject at such venues as Harvard University, Stanford University and the 2006 International Citizen Reporters' Forum in Seoul. He serves on the board of directors of the Media Bloggers Association and on the advisory boards of the Center for Citizen Media, NowPublic, and the Society for New Communications Research, among others.

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