Office: CMU 219
Phone: 685-9377
E-Mail: dunder@u.washington.edu

Doug Underwood is Associate Professor of Communication and the author of two books, When MBAs Rule the Newsroom: How the Marketers and Managers Are Reshaping Today’s Media and From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press, which was awarded a 2003 Distinguished Book Award by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. A third book, Hacks of Genius: The Great Journalistic Personalities as Novelists and the Perils of Pursuing Truth through Fiction, has been completed in draft and is under publisher review.

He has published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Journalism History, and other scholarly publications on such topics as media economics and management, media ethics, journalists’ religious beliefs, literature and journalism, and technology in the newsroom. His publications include survey research projects – among them a survey of the management practices at western daily newspapers and a nationwide survey of journalists’ religious values – undertaken with his UW colleague, Keith Stamm. He recently completed a survey of journalists to find out about their literary interests and ambitions. He also has been a contributor to the professional media review, Columbia Journalism Review.

Underwood teaches undergraduate courses in journalism ethics, journalism and literature, press and politics, and the intellectual foundations of journalism. He teaches two graduate seminars, “Seminar in Mass Media Structure” and “Media, Myth, and Ritual.” The mass media structure seminar examines economic changes and business trends in global and American media organizations and the impact of new management practices on journalists and the profession of journalism. He taught a version of this class while a visiting scholar at the Journalism Institute in Oslo, Norway in 2002. The media, myth, and ritual seminar analyzes the way media operate in a secular society with many of the characteristics that traditionally have been imputed to religion and spirituality. The interdisciplinary course draws from the fields of religious studies, sociology, cultural studies, journalism, art and literature, and media theory to ask how it is that media may come to fulfill a mythological and ritualistic role in society.

He joined the communication faculty in 1987 after a thirteen-year career as a political journalist and investigative reporter. He was the Olympia legislative bureau chief and the chief political writer for the Seattle Times (1981-1987); a congressional correspondent and environmental specialist in the Gannett News Service’s Washington, D.C. bureau (1976-1981); and a labor and government reporter for the Lansing (Mich.) State Journal (1974-1976). His investigative reporting into recruiting corruption in the Michigan State University football program won the 1975 Michigan Associated Press Sports Story of the Year Award for the State Journal. He also was cited in the 1984 Missouri-Penney feature writing award to the Seattle Times.