David McCumber will discuss the Star and its role in Tucson and Southern Arizona now and over the years. He will also touch on the future of newspapers and journalism.David McCumber is Executive Editor of the Arizona Daily Star.
His journalism career spans 56 years. A Nebraska native, he started work at age 16 at the Scottsbluff (Nebraska) Star-Herald. He has held reporting and editing positions at a dozen daily newspapers, including leading newsrooms at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Santa Barbara News-Press, Hearst Connecticut Newspapers, the Montana Standard and Lee Montana newspapers, and the Star. He has also served as Hearst Newspapers’ Washington bureau chief, Rocky Mountain regional editor, and West Regional News Director for Lee Enterprises. In that position he supervised the newsrooms of 27 newspapers across 13 states.
McCumber first came to the Arizona Daily Star in 1978. He helped to direct a series of stories on problems with the University of Arizona football program that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980, and in 1984 was himself a finalist for the Pulitzer as part of a team that revealed issues at the Hughes Aircraft defense plant.
Also, under his supervision the Star produced a major expose of the Arizona prison system; award-winning coverage of the 1983 floods; and a series of stories revealing serious health problems caused by trichloroethylene contamination of groundwater at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
He is the author of three books of nonfiction: The Cowboy Way: Seasons of a Montana Ranch (Avon); Playing off the Rail: A Pool Hustler’s Journey (Random House); and X-Rated: The Mitchell Brothers (Simon & Schuster), which was made into a Showtime movie starring Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. He is the co-author, with the late Andrew Schneider, of another book of nonfiction: An Air that Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of a Montana Town Revealed a National Scandal (Putnam).
He lives in the Picture Rocks area with his wife, artist Sarah Greene.
