LA Times hires Read to be its Seattle reporter

The Los Angeles Times has hired Richard Read, most recently part of the NerdWallet investigations team, to be its Seattle correspondent.

In an email to the staff, executive editor Norm Pearlstine wrote:

Rich joins us as our Northwest correspondent based in Seattle. Rich spent more than two decades at the Oregonian in Portland, where he won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for a series that illustrated the domestic impact of the Asian economic crisis by profiling the local industry that exports frozen French fries. He was part of a four-person team (including our own Kim Christensen) that won the Pulitzer for public service for a series detailing INS abuses in 2001, and was a 2008 finalist, with a team, for stories on the semiconductor industry expanding in China. Since 2016, he was one of three members of an investigative team at NerdWallet, uncovering student-loan debt-relief scams and exposing conflicts of interest in the USDA’s enforcement and regulation of the organic food industry. While at the Oregonian, he was Asia bureau chief, based in Tokyo, for five years and, upon returning to Portland, covered international business as well as education. He’s a graduate of Amherst College, with a degree in English, and did graduate study in economics and law at Harvard.