About the Team

James T. Hamilton is the Hearst Professor of Communication and the Director of the Journalism Program. His books on media markets and information provision include “Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism,” “All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News” (Princeton, 2004), “Regulation Through Revelation: The Origin, Politics, and Impacts of the Toxics Release Inventory Program” (Cambridge, 2005) and “Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming” (Princeton, 1998). He is currently working on (with co-author Fiona Morgan) a book about the information lives of low-income individuals. Through research in the field of computational journalism, he is also exploring how the costs of story discovery can be lowered through better use of data and algorithms.

For his accomplishments in research, he has won awards such as the David N Kershaw Award of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Goldsmith Book Prize from the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, the Frank Luther Mott Research Award, and a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship. Teaching awards from Duke and Harvard include the Allyn Young Prize for Excellence in Teaching the Principles of Economics, Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award, Bass Society of Fellows, and Susan Tifft Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.

Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Hamilton taught at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, where he directed the De Witt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. He earned a BA in Economics and Government (summa cum laude) and PhD in Economics from Harvard University.

Cheryl Phillips previously worked at The Seattle Times from 2002-2014. Her most recent position in Seattle was as Data Innovation Editor. In that role, she analyzed data for stories, facilitated online storytelling and coordinated newsroom data journalism training. She also was the deputy investigations editor, an assistant metro editor and an investigative reporter at The Seattle Times. In 2009, she was the lone editor in the newsroom when four police officers were shot at a coffee shop and was integrally involved in the subsequent coverage of the shooting and 30-hour manhunt for the suspect. That coverage by the newsroom received a Pulitzer Prize. She has twice been on teams that were Pulitzer finalists. She has worked at USA Today and at newspapers in Michigan, Montana and Texas.

Cheryl has taught data journalism and data visualization at the University of Washington and Seattle University. She also served for 10 years on the board of directors for Investigative Reporters and Editors, a grassroots training organization for journalists and she is a former IRE board president. She currently serves on an advisory board for Tableau Public, a data visualization software tool.