At Medill, he has served as both Acting Dean and Associate Dean. He is co-author of Nonvoters: America's No Shows, published in 1999, about why people don't vote. The book generated followup projects, funded by Pew Charitable Trusts, including "YVOTE 2000: Politics of a New Generation" and "YVOTE: A Dialogue with America's No-Show," that seek to reconnect young Americans with the political process by creating a new model for providing news on issues they care about in a manner they can relate to.

The original project was a collaboration with WTTW-TV, Chicago's public television station, under a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to produce innovative programming about the politically and culturally disaffected. Doppelt is also co-author of The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America, a book on investigative reporting and its influence on public policy. His expertise is media law and ethics, and the reporting of legal affairs.

As editor and publisher of On The Docket [at http://docket.medill.northwestern.edu/], he runs a student-driven web site that offers the web's only comprehensive coverage of all pending U.S. Supreme Court cases. Doppelt has published numerous articles on libel, the media's influence on the criminal justice system and media coverage of the legal system, including the drug trial of former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and a report for the Inspector General of the Department of Children and Family Services on "Confidentiality, the News Media and the Joseph Wallace Case."

He has consulted as an expert witness on media practices in a number of legal cases, including Jeffrey Masson v. New Yorker Magazine and Janet Malcolm. He has been a frequent guest host on WBEZ-FM, Chicago's public radio station, co-hosted a nine-part series on race relations that was simulcast on WBEZ-FM and WVON-AM, and coordinated a conference on "Guilt by Allegation: Lessons from the Cardinal Bernardin Case."

A graduate of Grinnell College and the University of Chicago Law School, Doppelt clerked for Illinois Supreme Court Justice Thomas J. Moran before becoming an investigative reporter and news producer. As an investigative journalist for the Better Government Association and WBBM-Newsradio in Chicago, he broke stories on court corruption, housing dangers and governmental conflicts of interest.


Teaching Philosophy
One of the hallmarks of my scholarly and professional dossier is that it incorporates a core student component. In 1995, with the initiation of the nonvoter project, then called the "turned off" project, to examine civic and political disengagement, a cornerstone of the funding proposal was an ambitious exercise in experiential learning that covered the gamut of educational and reportorial exposure.

The project deployed dozens of graduate students, closely supervised by as many as thirteen Medill faculty both in Washington, D.C. and Chicago to help design the poll; conduct 200 of the 1,001 phone interviews; interview nonvoters, voters, experts, candidates and public officials; report and write all the stories that set the stage for a WTTW-produced documentary that ran nationwide; and create the continuing web site.

The Medill-generated series became known as “No Show ‘96: Americans Who Don’t Vote.” The students came up with that, as well as the series logo, graphics, and the names for the five categories of nonvoters. En masse, they combed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1996 to interview officials and party faithful and to provide the project with a control group of committed active participants against which to juxtapose the nonvoters.

I have applied the experiential learning successes of the No Show project to the ongoing Supreme Court On the Docket project, which has resulted in the publication of more than 600 student-written stories over the past six years. My philosophy of teaching is to motivate, encourage, prod, cajole, and lead through a combination of enthusiasm for my subjects and a willingness to demonstrate to students that I don’t expect them to work any harder than I work.

This works particularly well in a hands-on learning environment such as Medill’s. Medill students expect to complete work products that matter to them, that they’re proud of, and that pass muster with others -- first, editors, and then the public. That has been the litmus test for both the No Show and On the Docket Supreme Court projects, as well as for the graduate global initiatives. The collaborative environment, whether it is as classroom discussion or as working newsroom, is critical, and when it works, it is kinetic, invigorating and sometimes draining.

When we have discussions on journalistic ethics, the dilemmas have to be real; they have to commit the students to the controversy, or they can devolve into ponderous exercises in which we all sound artificially concerned. I respect the students who push themselves, push some more, recognize they’ve cracked something they wouldn’t have cracked without the extra effort and then feel they’ve achieved a measure of self-discovery they can carry with them.

Courses Taught in the Last 3 Years
370 Law & Ethics of Journalism (undergraduate)
422 U.S. Legal Systems Seminar (graduate)
410 Global Journalism Seminar (graduate)
440 Global Journalism Seminar and residency (quarter abroad)

Research/Professional Activities
Moderator, "The Rwanda Media Trial: International Justice, Meaning and Consequences," Northwestern University, Chicago, April 5, 2004 (carried on C-Span)

Moderator, U.S. Senate Candidate Debate, Kennedy School of Government and Northwestern University Alumni Associations, Payton High School, Chicago, March 12, 2004

Speaker, "The Case of the Disappearing Protection: What's Left of Reporter's Privilege," Association for Women Journalists, Chicago, Feb. 18, 2004

Member, Journalism Advisory Committee, Evanston Township High School, January 2004 to date

Cited as source and appeared on broadcast newscasts multiple times during 2004, including an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor on Oct. 27, to discuss the study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism on news coverage of the Bush-Kerry race

Publications/Presentations
On the Docket (OTD), website on the U.S. Supreme Court, Northwestern University, Medill School of Journalism, (http://docket.medill.northwestern.edu/)A - As editor and publisher (also creator, of course), the on site publication requires of me substantial reporting and writing, and all the editing of all the stories and copy on the site (about 100 stories each Court term), an almost daily responsibility through the 2004 calendar year. The work constitutes a heretofore unavailable comprehensive information base for scholars and students, while reaching well beyond the legal and journalism communities to provide academia and the public with accurate, authoritative, exhaustive, permanent and timely information about the Court's cases at no cost.

"Polls, young voters may bring surprises,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 15, 2004 – Op ed that applied my prior research to the 2004 Presidential election campaign and presaged the somewhat unexpected increase in turnout of American youth.


Awards
Grant for Gateway to World News funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation