David McCumber, executive editor of The Arizona Daily Star, is an award-winning journalist and author. This is his third tour with the Star. In 1984, he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize with two other Star staffers for a report about deficiencies at the Tucson defense plant then operated by the Hughes Aircraft Company. He also helped to direct the Star’s Pulitzer-winning investigation of the University of Arizona football program in 1980.
In subsequent years, he worked at the San Francisco Examiner as Sunday editor, city editor and assistant managing editor; at the Santa Barbara News-Press, as editor; at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, as newsroom leader for the last eight years of the P-I’s print life; as editor of a group of Hearst daily newspapers in Connecticut; and as Hearst’s Washington, D.C. bureau chief.
He went to work for Lee Enterprises in 2015 as editor of the Montana Standard in Butte, Montana, and later directed Lee’s news operations in five newspapers across the state. He then served as Lee’s Director of Local News for the west, overseeing news operations at 27 newspapers in 13 states, before returning to Tucson in 2023 as the Star’s news leader.
McCumber was the founding editor and publisher of Big Sky Journal magazine in Montana, which still thrives today 31 years after its founding. He was also editor of Montana Magazine as a part of his duties with Lee.
McCumber has authored three books “X-Rated: A story of Sex, Money and Death” (Simon & Schuster); “Playing off the Rail: A Pool Hustler’s Journey” (Random House) and “The Cowboy Way: Seasons of a Montana Ranch” (Avon Books). With Andrew Schneider, he co-authored a fourth, “An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana Uncovered a National Scandal” (Putnam).
McCumber lives in Tucson with his wife, Sarah Greene.
