Dan Pacheco Peter A. Horvitz Endowed Chair in Journalism Innovation S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University

Dan Pacheco is the Peter A. Horvitz Chair of Journalism Innovation at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University and author of the upcoming book, Experimenting With Emerging Media Platforms: Field Testing the Future, (Taylor & Francis / Routledge, launching June 2023). The book is based on an approach and set of exercises Pacheco has developed over the years to help students of journalism, film, public relations and advertising conduct controlled tests of new technologies to solve media-related problems.

Pacheco has a long history as an innovator in major media companies. He started his digital career as online producer for Washingtonpost.com, where he produced Interact, one of the first online news communities. Subsequently, as a principal product manager at America Online, he oversaw some of the internet’s first truly global community products. In 2005, after pioneering the first implementation of a social networking platform at a U.S. newspaper, he received an NAA “20 Under 40” award. In 2007, he received a Knight News Challenge grant to build a democratized publishing service that evolved into an eBook platform which he ran as a startup for four years. In 2014, he started and co-produced the USA TODAY NETWORK’s Harvest of Change VR project for the Oculus Rift, which was the world’s first large-scale use of virtual reality by a commercial news organization. Harvest of Change earned an Edward R. Murrow Award for its innovative use of 360-degree video for virtual reality.