David Shankbone

David Miller, better known by his pseudonym David Shankbone, is an American photographer and writer. He is noted for a series of interviews he conducted on Wikinews, a website operated by the [[Wikimedia Foundation.  In December 2007, he became the first citizen journalist to interview a sitting head of state, Israeli President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres.  Other interview subjects included activist Al Sharpton, writer Augusten Burroughs , journalist Gay Talese , Ingrid Newkirk and three 2008 Republican U.S. Presidential contenders.  In his interview, Billy West called Shankbone the "Barbara Walters of the Internet" after he revealed to Shankbone details about his childhood abuse.

Shankbone’s photography is primarily associated with the Creative Commons and Wikipedia, where he claims his images illustrate over 4,000 articles. He has referred to the work as a “documentation of human existence” and he collaborated with professional photographers Billy Name (whom he cites as a mentor), Christopher Makos, Peter Palladino and Keith Green. His photography has been reproduced in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Encyclopedia Britannica , Duke University Press , LA Weekly , and numerous blogs, websites, books and other publications.

Background
He claims he has lived in seventeen cities, six states and three countries. He attended the University of Colorado and Fordham Law School, although the latter he dropped out of one year short of graduation, supposedly due to financial difficulties. He continued with a career in law as a paralegal and described the Fordham experience as a trauma.

Israel
In 2007, Shankbone joined a press junket that included writers for BusinessWeek, USA Today, PC Week and Salon.com on a review of the Israeli technology sector. While there he requested an interview with Israeli President Shimon Peres, which he was surprised to have granted.

Although he is not Jewish, he considers Israel “a second home” and he returned in 2009 to photograph the country, and in particular, the Negev desert. He photographed Grammy-winning hip-hop violinist Miri Ben-Ari and when Israeli rock star Ivri Lider toured the United States, Shankbone photographed him backstage at the Bowery Ballroom.

Wikipedia
""For the love of God, go out and find things out on your own. Don't listen to Fox News, don't listen to The Jerusalem Post. Go out and find different things. One source for knowledge is terrible.""

Shankbone began contributing to Wikipedia in June 2006. By 2007, the Jerusalem Post cited him as a “leading Wikipedia editor.”  He was a vocal opponent of changing the Santa Claus Wikipedia article to make it appear that the mythic being is real for the Christmas holiday. The subject came up over dinner with Yossi Vardi, the founding investor of Mirabilis, who challenged, “Who are you to say he is not real? What about God? Can you say that God does not exist?” In an interview with the daily newspaper Haaretz, in which he was called “the man who offed Santa”, Shankbone responded that Wikipedia is "there for knowledge, not for upholding cultural myths.”

In 2008, he was the target of an Internet stalker who tracked his movements and issued death threats against him. The pursuit was perpetuated on the English, French, Italian, German, Polish, Dutch and Spanish Wikipedia sites. When he was scheduled to give a talk at Columbia University, the unknown stalker detailed the different ways he could attack him. Around this time he was scheduled to fly to Rio de Janeiro to interview the mayor of the city as well as the architect Oscar Niemeyer, but he backed out of the trip over concern for his safety as his profile was steadily increasing. The stalker was upset over routine changes Shankbone had made to adult film director Michael Lucas’s Wikipedia article.

He has repeatedly retired from the website, only to return later. In July 2009 he said he retired from his photography because he was upset over an article in the New York Times by journalist Noam Cohen, although by September 2009 he was again contributing his celebrity photography.

Photography
A journalist for the Brooklyn Rail described his photographs as “incredibly wide ranging in their scope.” His subjects have included musicians Madonna and Kanye West, directors Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, Henry Kissinger and numerous entertainers, authors, models, politicians, lawyers and businessmen. His photography and blog post of former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey engaging in volunteerism for Exodus Transitional Community, a former prisoner rehabilitative program, was cited by Andrew Sullivan, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Towleroad.com as they were the first photographs of the governor’s new life.

Time Out New York published a comic strip based upon his photograph of Miss Understood.

Interviews
In 2009, the Columbia Journalism Review profiled Shankbone for his interviews. The reporter, Adam Rose, wrote that his “work feels like a bit of a throwback to a time when Oriana Fallaci published long transcripts of her interviews in book form and David Frost broadcast a six-hour sit-down with Richard Nixon.” When Shankbone became the first citizen journalist to interview a sitting head of state, it was remarked upon as a milestone in the development of Wikinews.

Blog
In June 2008 he began Shankbone.org, a blog that focuses primarily on his photography and politics, which lean far left. In 2009, he was involved in a dispute with author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez over material she was trying to keep off of Wikipedia that ended with the lesbian/bisexual-oriented website Afterellen.com repudiating the author, who it had previously written about favorably. He has continued interviews on his blog in a series where he asks the same five questions to people like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Bebe Buell and Evan Wolfson.