Dale Dougherty

In 2017 Dougherty came under fire for questioning the authenticity of female maker Naomi Wu. Dougherty publicly apologized to Wu for "my recent tweets questioning your identity," saying they represented a failure to live up to the inclusivity Make magazine should value. Wu herself considers the matter settled.

Dougherty is considered by some as the Father of the Maker Movement.Dougherty was the CEO of Maker Media, a spin-off from O'Reilly Media. The company published Make magazine, had an ecommerce site (Makershed), and conducted Maker Faires worldwide. In June 2017, the company ceased operations and laid off all 22 staff. In July 2019, Dougherty said that he had bought back the brands, domains and content from creditors and rehired 15 of the laid off staffers, and would announce the relaunch of the company with the new name “Make Community.”

Dougherty helped popularize the term "Web 2.0" at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in late 2004, though it was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999.

Dougherty was the founder, in 1993, and publisher of the Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first web portal and the first site on the internet to be supported by advertising. In 1995, AOL purchased GNN from O'Reilly & Associates. Part of the transaction included an investment by AOL of $3 million for 20 percent of O'Reilly's Songline Studios, which Dougherty ran. The organization published the Web Review and the Music Critic sites on the Internet.

Dale Dougherty (born 1955) is a co-founder of O'Reilly Media, along with Tim O'Reilly. While not at the company in its earliest stages as a technical documentation consulting company, Dale was instrumental in the development of O'Reilly's publishing business. He is the author of the O'Reilly book sed & awk.