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Richard Read
Richard Read (born 1957) is a freelance reporter based in Seattle, where he was a national reporter and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2019 to 2021. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was a senior writer and foreign correspondent for The Oregonian, working for the Portland, Oregon newspaper from 1981 to 1986 and 1989 until 2016.
Read has reported from more than 60 countries and all seven continents, covering wars in Cambodia and Afghanistan and disasters including the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Japan's 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. He won his first Pulitzer in 1999, The Oregonian's first in 42 years, for explaining the Asian financial crisis by following a container of french fries from a Northwest farm to the Far East, in a series that ended with riots presaging the Fall of Suharto.
Read was born in St Andrews, Scotland, to Katharine Read and Arthur Hinton Read, a mountaineer and St. Andrews University mathematics professor who worked during World War II for the Government Code and Cypher School that cracked the codes in Germany's Enigma machine. His paternal grandfather was John Read (chemist). He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and several grade-school friends at Shady Hill School founded a newspaper called The Old Rabbit. He graduated in 1975 from Concord Academy and in 1980 from Amherst College, where he edited The Amherst Student newspaper.
Read was press secretary in 1980 for the Ward Commission, a Massachusetts crime commission that exposed widespread corruption and proposed reforms including campaign-finance legislation whose design he oversaw. He moved to Portland in 1981 to become a reporter for The Oregonian.
In 1996-1997, Read was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University. He was selected by the Eisenhower Fellowships for a month's reporting in Peru in 1998, interviewing President Alberto Fujimori. He reported in North Korea in 1989 and 2007.
Read left The Oregonian in 2016 after taking a buyout, leaving words of advice to colleagues.
In 2016, Read joined the public-interest investigative reporting team at NerdWallet, a San Francisco company that helps consumers navigate personal finance. Team members investigated student-loan debt-relief companies, posting a Watch List of 150 businesses for borrowers to avoid. Read was a Pulitzer Prize juror in 2016, serving on the committee that nominated entrants in the explanatory reporting category.
In 2019, Read became a national reporter and Seattle bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, covering Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and Hawaii. A story by Read the next year on a super-spreading event early in the coronavirus pandemic gained a record online readership of more than 8 million, reporting on the deaths of two Skagit Valley Chorale members after a rehearsal on March 10, 2020.
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Richard Read
Richard Read (born 1957) is a freelance reporter based in Seattle, where he was a national reporter and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2019 to 2021. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was a senior writer and foreign correspondent for The Oregonian, working for the Portland, Oregon newspaper from 1981 to 1986 and 1989 until 2016.
Read has reported from more than 60 countries and all seven continents, covering wars in Cambodia and Afghanistan and disasters including the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Japan's 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. He won his first Pulitzer in 1999, The Oregonian's first in 42 years, for explaining the Asian financial crisis by following a container of french fries from a Northwest farm to the Far East, in a series that ended with riots presaging the Fall of Suharto.
Read was born in St Andrews, Scotland, to Katharine Read and Arthur Hinton Read, a mountaineer and St. Andrews University mathematics professor who worked during World War II for the Government Code and Cypher School that cracked the codes in Germany's Enigma machine. His paternal grandfather was John Read (chemist). He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and several grade-school friends at Shady Hill School founded a newspaper called The Old Rabbit. He graduated in 1975 from Concord Academy and in 1980 from Amherst College, where he edited The Amherst Student newspaper.
Read was press secretary in 1980 for the Ward Commission, a Massachusetts crime commission that exposed widespread corruption and proposed reforms including campaign-finance legislation whose design he oversaw. He moved to Portland in 1981 to become a reporter for The Oregonian.
In 1996-1997, Read was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University. He was selected by the Eisenhower Fellowships for a month's reporting in Peru in 1998, interviewing President Alberto Fujimori. He reported in North Korea in 1989 and 2007.
Read left The Oregonian in 2016 after taking a buyout, leaving words of advice to colleagues.
In 2016, Read joined the public-interest investigative reporting team at NerdWallet, a San Francisco company that helps consumers navigate personal finance. Team members investigated student-loan debt-relief companies, posting a Watch List of 150 businesses for borrowers to avoid. Read was a Pulitzer Prize juror in 2016, serving on the committee that nominated entrants in the explanatory reporting category.
In 2019, Read became a national reporter and Seattle bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, covering Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and Hawaii. A story by Read the next year on a super-spreading event early in the coronavirus pandemic gained a record online readership of more than 8 million, reporting on the deaths of two Skagit Valley Chorale members after a rehearsal on March 10, 2020.