The Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia

David Boardman is Dean of the School of Media and Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia. Previously, he was Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of The Seattle Times, the largest news organization in the Pacific Northwest.

Under his leadership, The Times won four Pulitzer Prizes. Those included the 2012 Pulitzer in investigative reporting, for a series revealing that state policies had led to hundreds of unnecessary drug-overdose deaths. In 2010, The Times won the Pulitzer in breaking news, presented for print and online coverage of the assassination of four police officers. In previous years, Boardman directed an investigation of abuses in the federal tribal-housing program, which won the 1997 Pulitzer for investigative reporting, and coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and its aftermath, which won the 1990 Pulitzer for national reporting. He also directed ten other projects that were Pulitzer finalists.

Boardman has been the recipient of numerous other major national awards, including the 2013 National Ethics Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Goldsmith Prize in Investigative Reporting from Harvard University, the Worth Bingham Prize in Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award. In 2012, the Online News Association chose Seattletimes.com as one of the four best large news websites in North America.

He is a board member and immediate past president of the American Society of News Editors, the nation’s premier organization for leaders in journalism. He is also the president of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He is chairman of the National Advisory Board of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and a Poynter Ethics Fellow.

Boardman served as a director and president of Investigative Reporters and Editors, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Steering Committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He is a charter member of the Advisory Board of ProPublica, the investigative-journalism nonprofit. He also serves as a board member for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, based in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and as a member of the Advisory Board of Investigative Reporting Denmark.

He has conducted seminars for journalists there and in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey and South Africa. He is also board member of the Solutions Journalism Network. He is a former member of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation Board and has served four times as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes. He is also a member of the Temple University Press Board of Review.

Before joining The Times in 1983, Boardman was a reporter and editor at several papers in the Northwest, and worked on a construction project in Liberia, West Africa. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and has a graduate degree from the University of Washington. He is an inductee of both the Medill Alumni Hall of Achievement and the University of Washington Communications Hall of Fame.

He has volunteered as a youth basketball coach and has served on advisory boards supporting music and journalism programs in the Seattle Public Schools.

He is married to Barbara Winslow Boardman, a writer and editor. They have two daughters. He enjoys kayaking, hiking, yoga, reading, cooking, wine, travel, music, and playing with his golden retriever, and hopes Northwestern will make it into the NCAA basketball tournament before he dies.

The e-mail address of the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia is pioneers@broadcastpioneers.com