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Philip Meyer, a journalist who introduced computers to newsrooms in the late 1960s as a powerful tool for mining reams of data, inspiring generations of reporters to fuse social science methods with classic reporting to produce revelatory journalism, died Nov. 4 at his home in Carrboro, N.C. He was 93.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter Kathy Lucente.
Many newspapers today have teams of reporters who specialize in using computer programs to investigate trends in police shootings, political donations, climate change and other complicated topics obscured by seemingly insurmountable amounts of data.
Mr. Meyer began pursuing this method, known now as computer-assisted reporting, in 1966 as a Washington correspondent for the Knight Newspapers chain. On a year-long Nieman Fellowship in journalism at Harvard University, he took computer science classes to better understand how politicians were using polling and voting data.
One day, as a professor explained how computers could be tools for systematic measurement of seemingly intangible topics, Mr. Meyer thought back to newsroom conversations he’d had about reporting on social issues.
“We always ended with a shrug and a lament that there was no way to measure it,” he wrote in his autobiography “Paper Route.” “Now I began to wonder.”
Using rudimentary punch cards, Mr. Meyer dabbled in programming at Harvard’s computation center, which housed room-sized computers. One project was crunching survey data on the attitudes of high school students.
“Journalists and scientists, I realized, were basically in the same business, discovering and imparting the truth,” Mr. Meyer wrote. “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 organize such bodies of data on my own.”
After his fellowship ended, Mr. Meyer returned to Knight’s Washington bureau.
One evening in 1967, after everyone else had gone home, the phone rang. It was a Detroit Free Press editor. Race riots in the city were entering the fifth day. The paper, owned by the Knight chain, needed reporters to relieve its weary staff.
“Since I was the one who answered the phone,” he said, “I decided who went. So I sent myself.”
After the riots ended, editors and reporters at the paper discussed how little they knew about the rioters and their motivations. Mr. Meyer proposed a large survey that relied on the Detroit Urban League to help survey more than 400 African Americans in the city.
Using a University of Michigan computer to crunch the data, Mr. Meyer and other reporters were startled by the results, which revealed that — contrary to the opinion of the paper’s editorial writers — most who participated in the upheaval were not uneducated. Those who were college-educated were just as likely as high school students to riot.
Also, rioters were not, as some officials opined, displaced Southerners struggling to assimilate in northern cities. People from the north were three times as likely to riot.
The Free Press won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the urban tumult, including stories based on the survey data.
But a reporting revolution was not immediately born. Newsrooms were then still leery of any technology beyond typewriters.
“The business as a whole did not grasp the potential back in the early ’70s,” said James B. Steele, who along with Donald Barlett, worked with Mr. Meyer on a series about the sentencing of violent criminals for the Philadelphia Inquirer, then a Knight newspaper. “Phil was the prophet. He saw what this could be way before anybody else could.”
Mr. Meyer was undeterred. In 1973, he published “Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods,” a book about using computers and programming in reporting. To young journalists, it was a revelation, and it became a bible in journalism classes — including Mr. Meyer’s.
He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for nearly three decades. Brant Houston, a University of Illinois investigative journalism professor and expert in data reporting, said computers would probably have a difficult time crunching Mr. Meyer’s impact on reporting during the past 50-plus years.
“It would be like trying to measure the sea,” he said.
Philip Edward Meyer was born in Deshler, Neb., on Oct. 27, 1930, and grew up in Clay Center, Kan. His father sold used cars and ran a hardware store, and his mother was a schoolteacher and later a homemaker.
He was inspired to enter journalism by following the comic book adventures of Superman, the action hero who disguises himself as the nerdy, fumbling reporter Clark Kent.
“I rejoiced with the child Clark Kent when he discovered his superpowers,” Mr. Meyer wrote in his autobiography. “As one who was skinny and clumsy, I felt as though the fantasy was created just for me.”
In his teenage years, Mr. Meyer started wearing bow ties and reported for his high school’s newspaper and yearbook.
“It gave me a way of participating that was one degree removed from actually participating,” he wrote. “The role of observer made me a legitimate critic of any Inner Ring and freed me from the pain of striving for it.”
Mr. Meyer studied journalism at Kansas State University, graduating in 1952. He then served in the Navy as a public information officer for two years before returning to Kansas to work as an editor at the Topeka Daily Capital.
At the paper, he began dating Sue Quail, a wedding announcement writer. She wrote their wedding notice in 1956.
They moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., where Mr. Meyer received a master’s degree in political science. They moved again, this time to Florida where Mr. Meyer covered education at the Miami Herald. He joined Knight’s Washington bureau in 1962 as a correspondent for the Akron Beacon Journal.
Mr. Meyer’s wife died in 2021. In addition to Lucente, survivors include two other daughters, Melissa Meyer and Sarah Meyer; eight grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a brother. His daughter Caroline Meyer died in 2020.
In the days following his death, reporters around the world recalled how Mr. Meyer inspired them.
Marcelo Soares, an investigative journalist in Brazil, remembered reading “Precision Journalism” as a student.
“It opened my eyes for this kind of journalism,” Soares said. “I got in contact with him and said, ‘That’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.’”
Like other journalists relying on complicated data sets, Soares reached out to Mr. Meyer whenever he was stumped. He always made himself available.
“Even if I never had classes with him in person,” Soares said, “he was just about the best teacher I ever had in my life.”