Dan Gillmor, a former Merc columnist and proponent of citizen journalism, is headed to Arizona State University to become the founding director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He starts Jan. 1 and will hold the faculty rank of professor of practice, ASU has announced.

What will he tell students? Here’s what he said in a June 7 Chronicle op-ed:

“There’s never been a better time, I tell students, to be a journalistic entrepreneur — to invent your own job, to become part of the generation that figures out how to produce and, yes, sell the journalism we desperately need as a society and as citizens of a shrinking planet.”