Steve Doig (@sdoig) is the Knight Chair in Journalism, specializing in
computer-assisted reporting — the use of computers and social science techniques
to help journalists do their jobs better. The chair was created with a $1.5 million
endowment given to the Cronkite School by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Doig joined the Arizona State University faculty in 1996 after a 23-year career
as a newspaper journalist, including 19 years at the Miami Herald. There, he served
variously as research editor, pollster, science editor, columnist, federal courts reporter, state capital bureau chief, education reporter and aviation writer.
Investigative projects on which he worked at the Miami Herald have won several major
journalism prizes, including:
• The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (1993) for What Went Wrong, an analysis of the
damage patterns from Hurricane Andrew that showed how weakened building codes
and poor construction practices contributed to the extent of the disaster.
• The Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting (1994) for Lost in America, an
examination of how the nation’s immigration policies have failed.
• The Investigative Reporters & Editors Award (1995) for Crime and No Punishment, a
probe into why South Florida had the highest crime rate and the lowest incarceration
rate of any major metropolitan area in the country.
Doig is a political science graduate of Dartmouth College. He also graduated
from, and later taught at, the Defense Information School and spent a year as a combat
correspondent for the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, for which he was awarded a
Bronze Star.
He currently teaches graduate courses in the Cronkite School’s professional master’s
program, including the print reporting portion of the Journalism Skills (MCO 591)
bootcamp as well as Media Research Methods (MCO 510). He also served two years as
interim director of the Cronkite School. In 2010, he spent four months in Portugal as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, teaching graduate students at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and lecturing around the country. During the summers, he helps students working with the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative on data-heavy projects.
Doig actively consults with print and broadcast news media outlets around
the world on computer-assisted reporting problems. Most recently, he did
the data analysis for a year-long investigation by CaliforniaWatch.org into hospital
billing practices in the state. Other examples include a study of racial profiling in
Massachusetts traffic tickets for the Boston Globe, a study for the Cleveland Plain Dealer
of racial differences in access to health care and an analysis of the 185,000 uncounted
ballots in the Florida presidential election of 2000 for the Miami Herald.
He is an active member of Investigative Reporters & Editors and served on the 4,000-
member organization’s board of directors for four years. Recently, he worked with
IRE to organize and judge a new journalism contest, called the Phil Meyer Award, to
recognize the best journalism done each year using social science techniques.
In addition, he has been a speaker at many national meetings of journalism and
other organizations. He also has traveled to Canada, England, Spain, Portugal, the
Netherlands, Mexico, Norway, Ukraine, Belgium, Brazil and Indonesia to do training in
precision journalism techniques.
Professor Doig's research interests include newsroom diversity, demographics, public
opinion polling, crowd estimation and finding techniques used by other professions
that can be developed into tools for journalists.
He is happy to work with students who are interested in doing independent projects
that result in significant pieces of journalism.
| 
Twitter
Facebook
Cronkite News