Matt Waite is a professor of practice at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, teaching reporting and digital product development. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism from UNL.
In 2011, Waite founded the Drone Journalism Lab, the first drone program at a journalism school in the world. Since then, Waite and his students have spoken about drones to journalists around the world. Students have produced stories with drones in India, Kenya and Turkey.
Prior to joining the faculty, he was the senior news technologist for the St. Petersburg Times of Florida and the principal developer of PolitiFact, a website that fact checks what politicians say. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, the first website win such award.
Waite has covered crime, police, municipal government and breaking news, including deadly tornadoes and the crash of American Airlines flight 1420 at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and St. Petersburg Times. He co-authored a series of award-winning stories about Florida’s vanishing wetlands, later expanded into a book, “Paving Paradise: Florida’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss,” published in 2009 by the University Press of Florida.
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