Very few people remember presidential candidates like Pete du Pont or Paul Tsongas. However, Doug Swanson rode around with them for several days while working as a journalist for The Dallas Morning News. Swanson, who currently works as a professor at Pitt, also spent a while with Jerry Brown, former governor of California, while he was running for president in 1992. Driving around in a van together, Brown proved to be a hard interview.
“I get these monosyllabic answers, and so I just started telling him jokes about himself — because there were all these Jerry Brown jokes out there — which really pissed him off, but that got him talking,” Swanson said.
Each presidential cycle, reporters show up to New Hampshire’s primary — the first to occur nationwide — in droves. Swanson was one of the many reporters who covered the primaries, though he was not interested in the front-runners. Instead, he was attracted to more of the “lower-rung candidates,” meaning he was often the only reporter traveling around with them.
“That was the great thing about picking the lower-rung candidates, because they were desperate for attention and coverage,” Swanson said. “The guys who were the front-runners, they got buses of reporters following them around. But the people who were the back of the pack, if somebody from Dallas wants to come ride around with them — sure, they’re happy to have you.”
Swanson, who is originally from Florida, spent most of his 38-year career in journalism working at The Dallas Morning News. He also authored five crime novels and three nonfiction books. Before arriving at Pitt in 2016, Swanson briefly taught journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas. Since starting at Pitt, Swanson has taught a number of writing classes, including Introduction to Journalism and Nonfiction and Sports Writing.
Though Swanson primarily worked in Texas, he also spent time in New York and California and spent about seven weeks covering the war in Iraq with U.S. Army units in 2006. He worked across the country, covering various state governments.
“I had a great time,” Swanson said. “It’s a whole lot of all the old cliches. No one day is like the other, and you just meet some really interesting people and go fascinating places. My goal was to get to all 50 states, but I only made it to 48 because nothing was happening in Nebraska or North Dakota at the time.”
Swanson started out “writing stories about weird people doing weird stuff,” though he gravitated towards stories about crime. In 1981, Swanson was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for his local crime reporting.
“It was a lot of weird crime stories,” Swanson said. “I used to just travel around to little Texas towns and write stories about weirdness in these little towns.”
In one case, Swanson recalled writing about an alcoholic father whose family murdered him, buried him in the backyard and kept it secret for about 20 years. In a similar vein, Swanson remembers writing about Candy Montgomery, who killed another woman with an ax but was acquitted of the murder charge.
Swanson also gravitated towards stories about politics and government, including about people wrongfully put on death row. As part of the investigative projects staff at The Dallas Morning News, he often had months — sometimes years — to work on stories. In particular, Swanson investigated the state agencies regulating doctors, juvenile prisons and foster care.
“It was really good to just kind of dive into an agency,” Swanson said. “And because it was Texas, almost every state agency was screwed up somehow, some way, because Texas underfunds its state government.”
While investigating juvenile detention centers, Swanson reported on the widespread abuse kids faced inside these facilities, uncovered largely through documents directly from the Texas Youth Commission.
“I wrote a bunch of stories, and the state came in and cracked down and changed things,” Swanson said. “That’s the most important part, is maybe life was made a tiny bit better by what I wrote, for a little while. It wasn’t revolutionary, but maybe an incremental improvement. That’s all I can ask for, I guess.”
In addition to his journalistic work, Swanson wrote two nonfiction books in 2014 and 2015 on Benny Binion — a Texas racketeer who started the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. For his third book, Swanson said his publisher wanted “a big Texas book,” so he spent five years researching and writing about the Texas Rangers, a historical statewide law enforcement agency.
Swanson traced the history of the fabled Rangers, chronicling stories about them while also reckoning with their role in perpetuating the white and propertied power structures of Texas. The book was not received well by the Rangers. He later learned that his critics at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame had assembled a 2,000-page dossier on him.
Now that he’s working in Pittsburgh, Swanson’s current project is a biography of Henry Clay Frick, as he saw a lack of a “big, complete Frick biography.”
Other than traveling on occasion, Swanson describes teaching as his “retirement gig.”
“I don’t play golf, I don’t fish,” Swanson said. “I teach and write. That’s pretty much all I do.”
As a writing professor, Swanson often shares his experiences as a reporter, though he said he tries to limit himself to one story per class session. Swanson said when it comes to teaching accuracy, he wants to give students “the benefit of all the mistakes [he] made in 40 years of journalism.”
Will Christie, a junior public and professional writing major, took Swanson for Sports Writing and now serves as a teaching assistant in Introduction to Journalism and Nonfiction for Swanson. Christie recalled Swanson sharing an anecdote about a story he wrote that some of the subjects did not want published in a lesson on ethical storytelling.
“I’d say he’s very relatable in that sense,” Christie said. “He’s not worried about telling students about things that he’s done in his past or mistakes he’s made in the past … He’s very easygoing about it, and I think that gets through to the students a lot more.”
In particular, Swanson said he shares anecdotes about past interviews and his strategies for them. He shared an example of doing so, like the jokes he once told to get Jerry Brown talking.
“Usually you have to be agreeable, but sometimes you have to be adversarial, and sometimes you just have to be persistent,” Swanson said. “It just depends on the situation … I try to teach them how to be polite but persistent in the pursuit of this information.”
As a former investigative journalist, Swanson wants his students to learn how to find and understand information — especially public documents such as property records, restaurant inspection records and court filings — which he described as “the bread and butter of journalism.” Though only a few students in each of his classes plan on becoming writers, Swanson said he wants to teach students how to think critically and how to write better.
Gabe James, a senior media and professional communications major, took Sports Writing and Introduction to Journalism and Nonfiction with Swanson. He said class with Swanson made him a more confident person and helped him with “being able to engage with people more.”
“I don’t just go up and talk to random people a lot, so that was at first challenging for me, but he had us do it a lot, so that kind of desensitized me to that kind of interaction with just random people,” James said.
Christie said his biggest takeaways from Swanson were learning how to earn credibility as a writer and how to be vulnerable. He recommends classes with Swanson to anyone, “just to get to know him as a professor.”
“You can learn a lot of useful life advice along with writing skills that I don’t think other classes at Pitt really try to teach as much,” Christie said. “Your biggest takeaway from that is you can learn to be a good person while also learning how to write effectively.”
Christie formerly worked for The Pitt News.