TheSmokingGun.com founder to speak in Ithaca

Ithaca College graduate Danny Green, the reporter who co-founded the website The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com), will return to his alma mater, on Wednesday, Nov. 15, to speak on “Google Isn’t Everything: How Inexperienced Investigative Journalists Rely Too Much on the Internet and Not Enough on the Telephone.” Free and open to the public, Green’s talk will start at 7:30 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium.Started in 1997, TheSmokingGun.com is populated with police reports, court files, FBI dossiers and mug shots. Visually, The Smoking Gun isn’t a jazzy website, but the documents posted there, many obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, have been used to break stories picked up by newspapers and television outlets around the world. For example, The Smoking Gun unearthed police reports, court records, and interviews with law enforcement personnel that proved James Frey had fabricated significant portions of his best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.” Another big scoop centered on Rick Rockwell, the “prize” groom of Fox’s “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire.” The Smoking Gun posted the restraining order filed by Rockwell’s fiancée, who claimed Rockwell threatened to kill her.Purchased by Court TV in 2000, The Smoking Gun receives about 40 million page views per month. Now the site’s director of development, Green also works as an editor at courttv.com. He was formerly a freelance journalist who wrote for GQ, The Village Voice, Sports Illustrated and hundreds of other publications. He graduated from the Roy H. Park School of Communications in 1985 with a degree in cinema and photography.Green will be available for interviews at selected times during his Ithaca visit. For more information, contact Keith Davis, assistant director of media relations, at (607) 274-1153 or kdavis@ithaca.edu.