David McCumber

David McCumber has spoken at ADAO twice before, as keynote speaker in 2017 and as Andrew Schneider Memorial lecturer in 2019. He and Schneider co-authored “An Air that Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of a Montana Town Revealed a National Scandal.”

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 worked at 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 misconduct at the Hughes Aircraft defense plant.

Also under his supervision the Star produced a major expose of the Arizona prison system 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 other 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.