J. Peder Zane | |
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 Zane in 2019 | |
| Born | May 27, 1962 New York, New York |
| Occupation | Journalist, academic |
John Peder Zane (born May 27, 1962) is an American journalist who is a columnist for RealClearPolitics [1] and Articles Editor for RealClearInvestigations. His national awards include the Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of News Editors. [2]
Zane was born in New York City. After graduating from Collegiate School, [3] he earned a BA from Wesleyan University in 1984 and an MS (with Honors) from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1989. [4]
He joined The New York Times in 1990 as a member of the Writing Program for young reporters. In 1991–92, he was the chief reporter for the 80th Neediest Cases campaign, which the Times said was "the most successful campaign in its history." [5] In 1995, he won the Blues Foundation's Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Journalism [6] for his New York Times article on Fat Possum Records and Rooster Blues records.
From 1996 to 2009 he served as book review editor and books columnist for The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina. In addition to his ASNE Award, Zane won one second-place (2005) and two third-place awards (2001 and 2002) from the National Headliner Awards for Special or Feature Column on One Subject. From 2005 through 2007 he served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, where he was in charge of membership. [7] Zane was embroiled in a controversy that erupted when the NBCC Awards finalists were announced in 2007. The previous year's winner for criticism, Eliot Weinberger, asserted that one of the finalists, "While Europe Slept" author Bruce Bawer, had engaged in "racism as criticism" through its warnings about Europe's failures to integrate Muslim immigrants. Zane told the New York Times: "He not only was completely unfair to Bruce Bawer he’s also saying that those of us who put the book on the finalist list are racist or too stupid to know we’re racist." [8]
In 2006, Zane edited a special section, "Ghosts of 1898," [9] on the Wilmington race riot for the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News and Observer. This 16-page special section, written by historian Timothy B. Tyson, was widely distributed. Soon afterward, the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation requiring public schools to teach students about the white supremacy campaigns and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. "Ghosts of 1898" won an Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. [10]
In 2009 Zane wrote the first of a series of columns in the News & Observer [11] calling on North Carolina to tear down the Confederate Monument [12] that towers before the state legislature in Raleigh (which happened in 2020). His work presaged the much wider national debate on controversial statues ignited in 2017 by the deadly protest and counter-protest over plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. [13]
Zane left the N&O in 2009. Between 2014 and 2020 he was a contributing columnist on the newspaper's op-ed page. [14]
He served as master of ceremonies for the bi-annual induction ceremonies of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018. [15]
Between 2011 and 2016 he was an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Saint Augustine's University in Raleigh, North Carolina. [16] He was chairman of the department from 2012 to 2015.
He has taught writing at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy [17] and in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Zane conceived, edited and contributed to two works published W.W. Norton. "Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and their Adventures in Reading" (2004) is a collection of essays on books by authors including Charles Frazier, Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Millet, Lee Smith and Zane, who wrote about Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud. [18] "The Top Ten: Writers Pick their Favorite Books" (2007) featured lists of what 125 leading American British authors – including Peter Carey, Michael Chabon, Stephen King, Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates – consider to be the 10 greatest works of fiction of all time. [19] Their picks were scored and weighted to create a list of the "Top Ten Books of All Time" whose top five selections were Anna Karenina , Madame Bovary, War and Peace , The Great Gatsby , and Lolita . He continued this project at the website Top Ten Books, which has more than 160 author lists.[ citation needed ]
In 2012 Doubleday published his book with Professor Adrian Bejan of Duke University titled "Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization." [20] It details Bejan's discovery of the constructal law, a principle of physics which proclaims that shape and structure arises and evolves in nature to facilitate flow access.
In May 2015, The University of South Carolina Press published a collection of newspapers columns he wrote as Book Review Editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, "Off the Books: On Literature and Culture." [21] In 2023, Post Hill Press published "Coded to Kill," the techno-medical thriller Zane co-authored with Dr. Marschall S. Runge, who is Dean of University of Michigan’s Medical School and CEO of Michigan Medicine.[ citation needed ]
Josephus Daniels was an American diplomat and newspaper editor from the 1880s until his death, who managed The News & Observer in Raleigh, at the time North Carolina's largest circulation newspaper, for decades. A Democrat, he was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to serve as Secretary of the Navy during World War I. He became a close friend and supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. After Roosevelt was elected President of the United States, he appointed Daniels as his U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, serving from 1933 to 1941. Daniels was a vehement white supremacist and segregationist. Along with Charles Brantley Aycock and Furnifold McLendel Simmons, he was a leading perpetrator of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898.
Dan Neil is an American journalist who is an automotive columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, AutoWeek and Car and Driver. He was a panelist on 2011's The Car Show with Adam Carolla on Speed Channel.
Theodore Bruce Bawer is an American-Norwegian writer. Born and raised in New York, he has been a resident of Norway since 1999 and became a citizen of Norway in 2024. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and a novelist and poet, who has also written about gay rights, Christianity, and Islam.
The News & Observer is an American regional daily newspaper that serves the greater Triangle area based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The paper is the largest in circulation in the state. The paper has been awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, the most recent of which was in 1996 for a series on the health and environmental impact of North Carolina's booming hog industry. The paper was one of the first in the world to launch an online version of the publication, Nando.net in 1994.
Vermont Connecticut Royster was the editor of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal from 1958 to 1971. He was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his writing, and numerous other awards. Royster was famed for providing a conservative interpretation of the news every day, especially regarding economic issues.
Samuel Talmadge Ragan was an American journalist, author, poet, and arts advocate from North Carolina.
Timothy B. Tyson is an American writer and historian who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. He is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and an adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina.
Thomas Grey Wicker was an American journalist. He was a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times.
Joe Posnanski, nicknamed "Poz" and "Joe Po", is an American sports journalist. A former senior columnist for Sports Illustrated and columnist for The Kansas City Star, he currently writes for his personal blog JoeBlogs.
Christine Brennan is a sports columnist for USA Today, a commentator on ABC News, CNN, PBS NewsHour and NPR, and a best-selling author. She was the first female sports reporter for the Miami Herald in 1981, the first woman at the Washington Post on the Washington Redskins beat in 1985, and the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media in 1988. Brennan won the 2020 Red Smith Award, presented annually by the Associated Press Sports Editors to a person who has made "major contributions to sports journalism."
Michael Skube is a former journalist who is on the faculty of the Elon University School of Communications.
Jack Betts was a journalist and columnist for the Charlotte Observer, where he retired as the Associate Editor in 2011. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina and wrote primarily on topics related to North Carolina government and politics. Betts and his wife Martha live near Dan, Virginia.
The Mini Page is a syndicated newspaper supplement for children, created by Betty Debnam in 1969 and authored by her and two other writers.
Claude Fox Sitton was an American newspaper reporter and editor. He worked for The New York Times during the 1950s and 1960s, known for his coverage of the civil rights movement. He went on to become national news director of the Times and then editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Perry Deane Young was a journalist, author, playwright, historian, and professional gardener. He was the author of Two of the Missing, about fellow journalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, who went missing during the Vietnam War and whose fates remain unknown, and the co-author of The David Kopay Story, a biography of 1970's professional football player David Kopay, who revealed in 1975 that he was gay.
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within is a 2006 book by Bruce Bawer. It was Bawer's second book dealing with the issue of religious fundamentalism, following his earlier Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, a critique of fundamentalist Christianity published in 1998.
Richard Prince is an American journalist for newspapers, including The Washington Post, and long-term columnist of "Journal-isms," formerly for the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, now on its own site, journal-isms.com. Prince won multiple awards during his career and is known for coverage about diversity in journalism. In 1972, he was a member of the Metro Seven group who protested racial discrimination at The Washington Post.
Robert Keith Hiaasen was an American journalist and assistant editor at The Capital, a newspaper published in Annapolis, Maryland. He also taught at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. A native of Plantation, then a rural suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Hiaasen began his career at The Palm Beach Post before joining The Baltimore Sun as a feature writer and where he later wrote a regular column. He was shot and killed at work at The Capital during the Capital Gazette shooting.
Charlotte Hilton Green was a writer and naturalist, environmentalist, educator and clubwoman. She was born in Dunkirk, New York, but moved to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1920, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of classic works about birds in the natural environment of the American South, a columnist who wrote a nature column, "Out of doors in Carolina" for The News and Observer for 42 years.
William John Woestendiek Jr. was an American journalist and author. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1987 for articles "which included proving the innocence of a man convicted of murder". After retiring from journalism, he started a blog, Ohmidog!, which focused on the relationships between people and their canine companions. Woestendiek wrote two non-fiction books: Dog, Inc.: The Uncanny Story of Cloning Man’s Best Friend and Travels With Ace.
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