Philip Meyer, reporter who brought data crunching to newsrooms, dies at 93

Veteran journalist Philip Meyer, a reporter who introduced computers to newsrooms as a powerful tool for mining reams of data in the late 1960s, died Nov. 4 at his home in Carrboro, N.C. He was 93.

He inspired generations of reporters to fuse social science methods with classic reporting to produce revelatory journalism. According to his daughter Kathy Lucente, the cause was complications from Parkinson's disease, reports Washington Post.

Today, many newspapers have teams of reporters who specialise in using computer programmes to investigate trends in police shootings, political donations, climate change, and other complex topics obscured by seemingly insurmountable amounts of data, writes the US media.

As a Washington correspondent for the Knight Newspapers chain, Mr. Meyer pioneered this method, now known as computer-assisted reporting, in 1966. During a year-long Nieman Journalism Fellowship at Harvard University, he took computer science classes to better understand how politicians used polling and voting data.

Mr. Meyer recalled newsroom conversations about reporting on social issues as a professor explained how computers could be tools for systematic measurement of seemingly intangible topics.

Mr. Meyer dabbled in programming at Harvard's computation centre, which housed room-sized computers, using rudimentary punch cards. One project was crunching survey data on high school students' attitudes.

"Journalists and scientists, I realised, were basically in the same business, discovering and imparting the truth," Mr. Meyer wrote in his essay. "Now I saw how statistical tools could dredge meaning from large bodies of data, and I grew confident that I could learn to collect and organise such bodies of data on my own."

He spent nearly three decades as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Brant Houston, a University of Illinois investigative journalism professor and data reporting expert, believes computers would struggle to calculate Mr. Meyer's impact on reporting over the past 50 years.

Philip Edward Meyer was born on October 27, 1930, in Deshler, Nebraska, and grew up in Clay Centre, Kansas. His father sold used cars and ran a hardware store, and his mother taught school before becoming a stay-at-home mom.

Following the comic book adventures of Superman, the action hero who disguises himself as the nerdy, bumbling reporter Clark Kent, inspired him to pursue a career in journalism.

Mr. Meyer began wearing bow ties in his adolescence and began reporting for his high school's newspaper and yearbook.

Mr. Meyer earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Kansas State University in 1952. After two years in the Navy as a public information officer, he returned to Kansas to work as an editor at the Topeka Daily Capital.