David Hipschman has put his journalism, law enforcement, and management experience to work helping individuals, businesses and communities. He now works as a columnist and technical consultant for Aviation Group, Ltd., which publishes membership-driven flying magazines, and edits part-time for the New York Times Regional Editing Center in Gainesville, Florida.
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.
After a more than three decades in newspaper and publications management with a background in international affairs and aviation journalism, he became interested in law enforcement. He is a graduate of the Wisconsin State Law Enforcement Recruit Academy and the Wisconsin State Basic Investigator Academy. He retired as a police detective in 2010 after serving a small Wisconsin community for six years, and also owned a licensed private investigation consulting firm.
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, and is a licensed pilot.
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 on union calls in live theater, rock concerts, and industrial shows; as a stage carpenter for a union theatrical design shop, and spent three 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, and has written about the refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border. He managed the Chronicle’s international news operations, including a Tokyo bureau, a Pacific Rim correspondent and more than 50 correspondents of the Chronicle Foreign Service. Previously, he was responsible for coverage of the White House, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.
He left the Chronicle in 1990 and moved to Montana, where he edited and published 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 attention 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.
He has also served as city editor of a Gannett daily newspaper and as general manager of Calaveras First, a newspaper publishing company.
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, Reid Advanced Interview training, and was a Taser instructor. He was a member of the Wisconsin Association for Identification and served as a member of both the Wyoming Governor’s Law Enforcement Task Force and Economic Development Task Force. He served on the Board of Directors of the Wyoming Press Association and the Wyoming branch of the Salvation Army.
He 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 Hawthorne, Florida with his wife Dorrie, who was recently named executive director of the Cade Museum for Innovation and Invention. They have three children.