Elliot Jaspin

Elliot Jaspin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, is now the System Editor for Cox Newspapers, where he directs the chain's computer-assisted reporting program. Jaspin's first newspaper job was on the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, Maine in 1970. During his first year as a reporter, he wrote a series of stories that freed a man who had been wrongly imprisoned for 42 years in a state mental hospital for the criminally insane. The following year he moved to The REPUBLICAN & Herald in Pottsville, Pa. where he worked as a general assignment reporter. He then spent two years at the Lehighton Times News in a neighboring county. In 1976 Jaspin returned to the Pottsville newspaper as its investigative reporter. He won numerous awards for his reporting including a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for a series on how Jimmy Hoffa bankrupted one of the nation's leading producers of anthracite coal. The same year Jaspin became the investigative reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News where he did an award winning series on the juvenile justice system in Philadelphia. In 1981, Jaspin moved to the Providence (R.I.) Journal, where he became interested in using computers as a reporting tool and taught himself how to work on the company's mainframe as well as learning how to program in three different computer languages. In 1989 Jaspin won a nine-month fellowship from the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University to develop a way to do computer-assisted reporting on a personal computer. The result of that fellowship was NineTrack Express, a software program that allowed a reporter with off-the-shelf hardware to convert information from mainframe computers into a form that could be used by personal computers. In 1992 Jaspin was hired by Cox Newspapers to direct the computer-assisted reporting program at the chain's 15 newspapers. In 1993 Jaspin was awarded the Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism award by the National Press Foundation for his work in computer-assisted reporting. Other winners have included David Broder of the Washington Post and William Safire of the New York Times. Jaspin, is a graduate of Colby College (Maine). He has two children; Katy and Jessica, and lives in Annapolis, Maryland.