Peter Rinearson | |
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Born | April 8, 1954 Seattle, Washington |
Occupation | journalist, author, entrepreneur |
Notable credit(s) | "Making It Fly," "Babynamer.com," The Road Ahead |
Peter Mark Rinearson (born April 8, 1954, Seattle) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling journalist, author and businessman.
Rinearson attended the University of Washington from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in communications—although not until 2004, when he returned to finish his last two credits. During his time in college, Rinearson was managing editor of the University of Washington Daily, editor of the Sammamish Valley News (the now-defunct weekly newspaper in Redmond, Washington), and winner of the National Championship of the William Randolph Hearst Journalism Awards program.
Rinearson originally wrote for the Seattle Times, for which he covered politics, Boeing, and Asia. In 1984, Rinearson won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a series he wrote on Boeing's development of the 757. Two years after winning the Pulitzer, he left the Times to write books.
The Pulitzer Prize Board announced a new category of "Explanatory Reporting" in November 1984, citing Rinearson's series of explanatory articles that seven months earlier had won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. The series, "Making It Fly," was a 29,000-word account of the development of the Boeing 757 jetliner. It had been entered in the National Reporting category, but judges moved it to Feature Writing to award it a prize. In the aftermath, the Pulitzer Prize Board said it was creating the new category in part because of the ambiguity about where explanatory accounts such as "Making It Fly" should be recognized.
Rinearson was subsequently a national semifinalist for NASA's Journalists in Space project, cancelled in the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy.