Sarah Cohen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, will join Duke's faculty next year as the Knight professor of the practice of journalism and public policy studies, administrators announced Thursday.
Cohen, who has been a database editor at The Washington Post since 1999, said she will conduct research on computational journalism-a field that utilizes large databases as a foundation for investigative reporting-in addition to teaching classes and working with the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. She succeeds William Raspberry, who was a columnist for The Washington Post and held his position at Duke for 13 years.
"We think she'll be a terrific teacher and incredible mentor for students," said Bruce Kuniholm, director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy.
Cohen is the second journalist from The Washington Post to sign on as a faculty member for next year. Philip Bennett, the paper's former managing editor, will also teach at Duke in the Fall.
"The bottom line is that between hiring Philip Bennett and Sarah Cohen, we feel we've got two extraordinary journalists who can add not just celebrity, but that real, hard-nosed journalists can really benefit from them," Kuniholm said.
Cohen said she will focus on teaching students how to critically analyze original documents and data, especially in the course she designed for Fall 2009 called "Presidential Transitions: Taking Power." In the Spring, she will teach "News as a Moral Battleground," as well as another course, which has not yet been determined, said Jay Hamilton, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center.
"For me, what's really important as an investigative reporter and also as a citizen is the idea of working from primary documents, rather than press reports," Cohen said. "That's the kind of thing I'm hoping to be able to work into the DeWitt [Wallace Center] as well as [Sanford]-different ways of looking at the world."
Although the courses Cohen will teach are geared toward students interested in public policy and journalism, both Cohen and Hamilton stressed that skills honed in investigative journalism are transferable to many disciplines.
"For the students that she'll be teaching, she'll really give you a very good grounding on the data you can piece together in a way to discover a pattern that will help you answer important questions," Hamilton said. "You can use that skill whether you're a reporter or a consultant or a government analyst."
When Hamilton became director of the DeWitt Wallace Center in July 2008, he said he redesigned the Knight professor position to answer two important questions for the future of journalism: how to maintain the watchdog function of investigative reporting as newspaper revenues drop and how to sustain involvement in the practice.
"Part of that includes lowering the cost of doing investigative reporting, and that's how we came up with the idea of a chair in computational journalism," he said.
As soon as Hamilton posted an advertisement for the position, Cohen's name was immediately suggested as an ideal candidate, Hamilton said.
"She is the perfect fit, because her background in computer-assisted reporting has really prepared her to develop the next generation of tools for reporters," he said. Hamilton added that Cohen's research at Duke will aim to provide journalists with the technology to analyze huge stores of public information.
In her presentations to Duke faculty, Hamilton said Cohen displayed an important focus on not only the reporting of news stories, but on how they can be extracted from primary data.
Cohen said she plans to retain ties to The Post while at Duke, hoping to eventually be able to test new computational journalism tools in that environment.
The connections that link Cohen and Bennett to Washington media will make them unique assets for Duke, Kuniholm said.
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