David’s Bio

David Hipschman has taught courses in how to think as an editor thinks at the University of Florida’s journalism school.  He owns a freelance editing, writing and publication consulting business. His clients include individual writers and publishers as well as the National Association of Flight Instructors, where he serves as editor of NAFI’s bi-monthly Mentor magazine and its weekly eMentor newsletter, and Cessna Flyer and Piper Flyer magazines where his bimonthly Heading Bug column appears.

His favorite failure was attempting to create an atelier designed to foster competency and ethics by teaching people to work with their hands, followed closely by owning Kinesis, a critically acclaimed literary magazine that left him penniless.

His career has included posts as Foreign Service Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Editor of the Fargo (North Dakota) Forum, Editor of the Casper (Wyoming) Star-Tribune, and as EAA’s Director of Publications in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Hipschman is the creator of Cyberland, the first weekly syndicated newspaper column about the Internet. He has been a contributing writer to Web Review, the Songline Studios and O’Reilly & Associates Internet magazine; a contributing editor to the American Reporter, the journalist-owned daily Internet newspaper, and is the author of Flying Sounds, a book of poetry.

Hipschman has also been employed in film and live theater, and has worked as a volunteer ambulance medic and firefighter, as a police detective and is a licensed pilot. He holds a U.S. Coast Guard merchant marine 50-ton certificate, with a 200-ton sailing endorsement.

His theater career has included screen credit as the assistant prop master on the Cookout, the Lions Gate film starring Danny Glover, Queen Latifah and the late Farah Fawcett. The on-location work included exotic prop food preparation, assisting the stunt team and responsibility for prop firearms. He has also worked as a stage manager, assistant-to-the-director, assistant stage manager, and stagehand in live theater, rock concerts, and industrial shows; as a stage carpenter for a union theatrical design shop, and spent several seasons as stage manager at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

He grew up at the New Jersey shore in his family’s kosher resort hotel, which was renowned for its Hungarian cuisine, and attended a school for chefs before beginning his journalism career. He worked as a reporter, bureau chief, copy editor and wire editor for newspapers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before going to work for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Hipschman covered events surrounding the Tiananmen Square massacre from Beijing.  He managed the Chronicle’s international news operation, including a Tokyo bureau, a Pacific Rim correspondent and more than 50 correspondents of the Chronicle Foreign Service.

He left the Chronicle in 1990 and moved to Montana, where he owned and edited Kinesis, a nationally distributed literary magazine with distribution contracts via Borders Books, Barnes & Noble and Tower Records.

Under his editorship of Wyoming’s only statewide newspaper, the Casper Star-Tribune won national praise for fighting hate crime in the wake of Mathew Shepard’s murder, and for Hipschman’s creation of InkLink – the newspaper-within-a-newspaper produced by the state’s K-12 students.

As EAA’s Director of Publications, Hipschman spearheaded efforts to deliver content via the Web, launched a learn-to-fly e-newsletter, hired the 170,000-member non-profit aviation association’s first multi-media journalist and managed its six print magazine titles, while serving as editor-in-chief of Sport Aviation, EAA’s flagship monthly magazine.

Hipschman is a graduate of the College of New Jersey. He served as a member of both the Wyoming Governor’s Law Enforcement Task Force and Economic Development Task Force. He also served on the board of directors of the Wyoming Press Association,  and the Alachua County, Florida Boys and Girls Club. He was also an elected county commissioner in Wisconsin.

He is also a graduate  of the Wisconsin State Law Enforcement Recruit Academy and the Wisconsin State Basic Investigator Academy and served a small Wisconsin village for six years before retiring with the rank of police detective.

Hipschman is the recipient of the following awards and honors:

• The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)

Media Award.

• The Wyoming Teachers’ Association School Bell

for outstanding service to students.

• The National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s PASS Award.

• The Deming Cup for newspaper excellence.

• The Wyoming Press Association’s Editorial Excellence Award.

• The Jefferson Fellowship at the East-West Center’s  Institute for Culture and Communication at the University of Hawaii.

Hipschman lives in Fort Myers, Florida with his wife Dorrie, who is the executive director of the Bailey-Mathews National Shell Museum on Sanibel Island. They have three grown children, a dog, a cat and a 2005 Catalina 350 sailboat named WindStar.