Peter Rinearson

Peter Rinearson
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[1]) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling journalist, author and businessman.[2]

Journalism career

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.[2][3]

Rinearson originally wrote for the Seattle Times, for which he covered politics, Boeing, and Asia.[2][4] 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.[5]

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.[5] 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.[2]

From 1995 to 1999, Rinearson assisted Bill Gates in writing a newspaper column carried by the New York Times Syndicate.[6]

Awards and honors

In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Rinearson's "Making It Fly" won the ASNE Distinguished Writing Award for business writing, from the American Society of News Editors.[7] Excerpts have been included in several books on journalism, including America's Best Newspaper Writing.[8]

Rinearson was also the recipient of the Lowell Thomas Prize from the American Society of Travel Writers for his consumer affairs journalism regarding air travel (he won first place in the "non-trip reporting" category),[9] the John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism, for his coverage of Japan, and the Special Paul Myher Award in the Penney-Missouri Journalism Awards from the University of Missouri School of Journalism (now known as the Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards).[2][10]

He has served as a member of the national advisory board of the Poynter Institute.[2]

Books authored

Rinearson co-wrote The Road Ahead with Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. It was Gates' first book and spent seven weeks at the top of The New York Times best-seller list.[2]

Previously in the 1980s, Rinearson had written how-to books on using Microsoft Word in MS-DOS for Microsoft Press.[11] Of one of these, New York Times reviewer Erik Sandberg-Diment wrote: "Word owners should not be without Rinearson's book, even if they read no more than a tenth of it." [12] According to Rinearson's official bio at his company, he "created the first software disk to accompany a Microsoft Press book, which presented a system of styles and style sheets that Microsoft later commissioned him to revise for Word for Windows. This work laid the foundation for the formatting styles built into Word today."[2]

Business

In 1988, Rinearson founded Alki Software, which created third-party products for Microsoft Word.[2] Alki licensed to Microsoft the toolbar and several other features of Microsoft Word version 5.1 for the Macintosh, and for more than a decade sold the Foreign Proofing Tool kits that allowed people to work with Word in multiple languages.[13]

In 1995, Rinearson co-founded a nine-person digital design company, Raster Ranch, that focused on 3D modeling for television, games, and the Web.[14]

Two years later, Rinearson spun off from Alki a subsidiary, Intype, which created Babynamer.com, which had 300,000 monthly visitors.[15] But the primary initiative of Intype was to build and market a Web-publishing platform that would enable a site to offer a blend of professional and community created content. Rinearson believed that the economic principle called network effects would catapult to dominance publishers who owned the primary places where people congregated online to create and consume their own content. Intype was an attempt to get the newspaper industry, where Rinearson had started his career, to embrace community content before Web startups gained a strong foothold.[13][15] The Newspaper Association of America used Intype's technology,[16] but when no newspapers followed suit Rinearson sold Intype to Oxygen Media in 1999.

He then became a senior vice-president at the Oxygen television network, followed by a stint as a corporate vice-president at Microsoft, where he was on the five-person senior leadership team of the Information Worker business unit that published Microsoft Office and other productivity software.

In 2005, Rinearson returned to his entrepreneurial roots, where he undertook projects that converged into Intersect.com, a service he founded which launched in December, 2010 and closed in 2013.[17]

In 2015 and 2016, Rinearson was back to writing, working on "a history of the Seattle area, focusing on its entrepreneurialism."[18] [19]

References

  1. ↑ Space Facts profile of astronaut candidate Peter Rinearson.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Alki Software profile of founder Peter Rinearson.
  3. ↑ Hearst Journalism Awards Program, 1978 championship winners.
  4. ↑ "Teaching Magazine and Feature Writing by Example: Using Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories in the Classroom," paper by Edward Jay Friedlander, University of South Florida, 2004.
  5. 1 2 Garlock, David (2003). Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1978-2003. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State Press. pp. 105–6. ISBN 0-8138-2545-8.
  6. ↑ "Brilliant, Sure, But Can He Write?" Seattle Times article by Jean Godden on Bill Gates writing a column for the New York Times Syndicate. January 6, 1995.
  7. ↑ ASNE Distinguished Writing Awards Winners.
  8. ↑ ISBN 978-0-312-44367-2 or for book details.
  9. ↑ May 26, 1985 Chicago Tribune article on the first winners of the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards.
  10. ↑ Penney-Missouri Journalism Awards, 1960-1993.
  11. ↑ Microsoft Taps Two New Information Worker VPs.
  12. ↑ "Personal Computers: Explaining the Explainers," a review of computer books in the New York Times, January 6, 1987.
  13. 1 2 "Journalism That Matters" interview with Peter Rinearson, March 2009.
  14. ↑ History of Alki Software.
  15. 1 2 Editor & Publisher column by Steve Outing, May 4, 1998.
  16. ↑ "Self-publishing tools will open doors for community groups," a report by Marion J. Love of "The Cole Papers," Sept. 1998.
  17. ↑ Biographies of members of the Intersect team, including that of CEO Peter Rinearon.
  18. ↑ Rinearson, Peter (November 17, 2015). "De-composition — Smithsonian sculpture by John Grade made to rot" (Includes note about the author.). Retrieved July 8, 2015.
  19. ↑ Rinearson, Peter (June 23, 2016). "Vashon tries to keep it real despite an influx of people and money". July 8, 2016 (Includes brief author bio.).
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