Philip Meyer, 93; pioneer in reporting
Philip Meyer, a former reporter who pioneered new ways to incorporate data, quantitative methods, and computers into investigative journalism, died on Saturday at his home in Carrboro, N.C., a suburb of Chapel Hill. He was 93.
His daughter Melissa Meyer said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
With a career spanning the latter half of the 20th century and several years into the 21st, Mr. Meyer was at the center of a revolution within the craft and business of journalism — a revolution that, to a large degree, he helped shape.
When he began working as an assistant editor at The Topeka Daily Capital in Kansas in the mid-1950s, computers were room-size, turtle-speed contraptions, and reporting was done mostly through interviews, with the occasional trip to the library or the government records office.
Mr. Meyer was among the few reporters who saw the growing power of computers to crunch data and produce new insight into complex questions.
His breakthrough came in 1967, in the aftermath of the Detroit riot that summer. Mr. Meyer, by then a national correspondent for The Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio, had spent the previous year at Harvard on a Nieman fellowship for journalists, intending to study how pollsters used computers to manipulate data. Instead, he realized the possibility of using computers in his own work.
He went on to The Detroit Free Press, where he immediately seized on a claim, common in the news media, that the rioters had mostly been poor, uneducated Black migrants from the South. He gathered as much demographic data as he could, ran it through a computer, and got a much different picture: The rioters were more likely to be locally born, and were spread evenly across the socioeconomic spectrum.
A year later, Mr. Meyer shared in the Pulitzer Prize for local general or spot news reporting, which went to The Detroit Free Press for its coverage of the riot.
That work earned Mr. Meyer national recognition as the leading thinker on bringing social-science methods into reporting. He summed up his approach in his book “Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods,” published in 1973 and today considered one of the most important books about reporting ever written.
“They are raising the ante on what it takes to be a journalist,” he wrote in his first chapter. Today, he said, “A reporter has to be a database manager, a data processor, and a data analyst.”
Not everyone agreed. In the early 1970s, Mr. Meyer consulted with two investigative reporters at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, for a sevenpart series analyzing whether judges were too lenient on violent offenders.
Many politicians said yes. But the trio, using a program Mr. Meyer wrote for a mainframe rented from a Maryland defense contractor, showed that the answer was conclusively no.
The series, “Crime and Injustice,” won several awards. But it was shut out from the Pulitzers, Steele said he was later told, by jurors who insisted that their work was not journalism.
“There was a lot of built-up resistance to something like that,” Steele said in a phone interview. “That didn’t seem like it was traditional reporting.”
That opposition weakened over time, as computers became central to daily life and reporters became comfortable with using data in a rigorous fashion, not as a replacement for traditional methods but as a supplement — a change instigated and guided by Mr. Meyer.