Philip Meyer

Philip Meyer is professor emeritus and former holder of the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He researches in the areas of journalism quality, precision journalism, civic journalism, polling, the newspaper industry, and communications technology. Meyer was a Nieman Fellow in 1966-1967. He blogs at http://philipmeyer.authorsxpress.com.

Meyer is a member of the Board of Contributors for USA TODAY's Forum Page, part of the newspaper’s Opinion section.

Before becoming a professor in 1981, Meyer was employed in the newspaper industry for a total of 26 years, the last 23 with Knight Ridder Inc., where he started as a reporter for the Miami Herald. In 1962, he became the Washington correspondent for the Akron Beacon Journal, then a national correspondent, and finally, from 1978-1981 the director of news research at company headquarters in Miami, where he worked on Knight Ridder's pioneering Viewtron online service.

One of the earliest examples of computer assisted reporting was in 1967, after riots in Detroit, when Meyer, on temporary assignment with the Detroit Free Press, used survey research, analyzed on a mainframe computer, to show that people who had attended college were equally likely to have rioted as were high school dropouts.

Meyer's most recent book is "Paper Route: Finding My Way to Precision Journalism," a memoir of his newspaper career. He has also written The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, Precision Journalism," Ethical Journalism: a Guide for Students, Practitioners and Consumers," and "The Newspaper Survival Book."

The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting hosts annual Philip Meyer Journalism Award, which recognize "recognize excellent journalism done using social science research methods".

The Summer 2008 Carolina Communicator includes a profile of Meyer http://issuu.com/jomcadmin/docs/ccsummer08.