Business and Local Government Editor David Staats joined the Idaho Statesman in 2004. He grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley, worked for a year as a reporter at the Southern Dutchess News, then studied journalism at Northwestern and Columbia universities. He has been a newsman and broadcast editor at the Associated Press in Portland, a state government reporter for the Albuquerque Journal in Santa Fe, and state editor at the Milwaukee Sentinel. He was managing editor of the Durango Herald in Colorado when it earned the national Society of Professional Journalists’ Public Service Award for coverage of a forest fire.