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Matthew Waite

Matthew Waite (b. April 4, 1975, in Blair, Nebraska) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning news technologist for Florida's largest newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, and co-author of Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss.1

While a student journalist at the University of Nebraska, he went to Bosnia to report on the conflict there. 1

He won an Investigative Reporters and Editors award in 1996 for a Daily Nebraskan story involving a computer-assisted examination of crime rates in a Lincoln, Neb., neighborhood. 1

He was hired as a police beat reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, Ark. While working late one night, he became the first reporter to arrive at the fatal crash of American Airlines flight 1420, which broke up on landing at the Little Rock airport.

Waite was hired at the St. Petersburg Times in 2000 as a general assignment reporter in west Pasco County. His best-known story there concerned a diner who was thrown out of an all-you-can-eat restaurant for eating too much.3

He then became an investigative reporter, winning state and national awards for a series of stories he wrote with environmental reporter Craig Pittman on Florida's vanishing wetlands. The first stories in the series were most notable for Waite's analysis of satellite imagery for the state of Florida, determining where wetlands had been in 1990 and where they had been paved over in 2003. Other stories followed documenting problems in how a system designed to protect wetlands actually made it easy to wipe them out.

The wetlands series won both the Waldo Proffitt Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism in Florida in 2006 and 2008, and the Society of Environmental Journalists' top investigative reporting prize, the Kevin Carmody Award, in 2006 and 2007.

That wetlands stories also led to Waite's book, co-written with Pittman. Paving Paradise was published in hardback in 2009 by the University Press of Florida. A paperback edition was published in 2010.

Waite's ability to work with databases and programming code led to him becoming the paper's news technologist. At the suggestion of Washington bureau chief Bill Adair, Waite developed Politifact, a website that provides a searchable database for checking politicians' promises, for use during the 2008 presidential race. That project won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, the first time a primarily web-oriented news operation won such the most prestigious prize in journalism.2

His slogan, popularized among other news technologists in the wake of the Pulitzer win, is, "Demos, not memos." In other words, don't waste time on bureaucracy, but keep experimenting with the technology.3