Dinah Zeiger came to academia as a second career, earning a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007, following a 20-plus year career as a journalist.
Her first journalism job was as a copy editor for a commodities news wire, a subject about which she knew nothing. Still, learning about it paid off, as that led to jobs in the Washington, D.C. bureau as news editor and then to London as bureau chief, overseeing stock, commodity and money markets in London, Paris, Rome, Frankfurt and Brussels. The Wall Street Journal recruited her for their European start up, and she worked in Brussels for several years before joining Investor’s Business Daily, first in Los Angeles, later as New York bureau chief. She later worked for McGraw-Hill in New York, then moved to Denver, where she was the technology reporter for the Denver Post.
Profound changes already were affecting the newspaper industry when she left 10 years ago; in fact, it was those changes that prompted her to return to college. She wanted to know what was really going on, and it wasn’t possible to see it from inside the institution.
Dinah teaches undergraduate journalism majors the basics of media law, as well as instructing them in the evolving craft of reporting. In addition, she leads a media law seminar each spring semester in the College of Law.