Since getting a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University-New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, Providence and Atlanta, was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. His book The Southern Press came out in 2009, and more recently, he edited and wrote the foreword to Bylines, a selection of magazine articles by his father Joe Cumming, who was Newsweek’s Southern bureau chief in the ’60s and ’70s. He taught Reporting in Urbino in 2011, 2012, and 2015. He taught in Armagh, Northern Ireland in 2014.