Peter R. Kann, chairman and chief executive office of Dow Jones & Company Inc., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and editorial director of Dow Jones' publications, has been elected chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
The announcement was made May 16 by President Rupp. Columbia awards the annual prizes on the board's recommendation.
The board also elected three new members: William B. Ketter, editor and vice president of The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, Mass.; Rena Pederson, vice president and editor of the editorial page of The Dallas Morning News, and William Safire, columnist for The New York Times. Members serve a maximum of nine years; chairmen are elected annually.
Kann succeeds Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor of The Washington Post, and Burl Osborne, publisher, editor and chief executive officer of The Dallas Morning News, who served as co-chairmen of the board. They and John S. Driscoll, former editor of The Boston Globe and visiting scholar at MIT are retiring from the board.
Kann has been with Dow Jones since 1963, when he was a Newspaper Fund intern in the San Francisco bureau of the Journal. He became a staff reporter the following year and worked in its Pittsburgh and Los Angeles news bureaus. He was the Journal's first resident reporter in Vietnam in 1967 and from 1969 through 1975 continued to cover the Vietnam War, as well as other events in Asia, as a roving reporter based in Hong Kong. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for reporting on international affairs for his coverage of the India-Pakistan War.
He was named the first publisher and editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, headquartered in Hong Kong, in 1976.
He returned to the United States in 1979 and later that year became associate publisher of the Journal, a vice president of Dow Jones and a member of its management committee. He was named executive vice president with responsibility for the company's international and magazine groups in 1985 and became a member of the board of directors in 1987. He became publisher of the Journal, editorial director of publications, and president and chief operating officer of Dow Jones in 1989. He became chief executive officer and chairman in 1991. A graduate of Harvard, he serves on the board of The Asia Society, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Spelman College and the Aspen Institute.
Ketter has been editor and vice president of The Patriot Ledger for 17 years. A suburban Boston daily with a circulation of 90,000, it is the largest evening paper in New England. Before that, he was with United Press International for 16 years in various staff and executive positions, including reporter, bureau chief, regional executive, division manager and corporate vice president.
He began his journalism career as a teen-ager working for his hometown weekly in Minnesota and continued as a reporter at the daily Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald while earning his bachelor's degree at the University of North Dakota.
Active in several professional organizations, Ketter is the 1995-96 president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He also is a member of the Media Advisory Committee of the National Scientists' Institute for Public Information and chairman of the New England Newspaper Association's Press Freedom Committee. He is the recipient of the New England Society of Professional Journalists "Yankee Quill" award for outstanding contributions to New England Journalism.
Pederson has overall responsibility for the opinion pages of The Dallas Morning News, supervising the staff and content of the editorial pages, letters pages, and Viewpoints (Op-Ed) pages. She has been a staff member of The News since 1973 and has served as federal beat reporter, feature writer, radio-TV editor and editor of the Viewpoints page. Before that, she was a reporter with United Press International (1970-72) and the Associated Press (1972) and worked in the Washington bureau of the Houston Chronicle (1973).
She graduated with honors with the University of Texas at Austin and received the master's degree from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.
Among the honors she has received are the Dallas Press Club Katy Award for feature writing and editorial writing, the Austin Headliners "Star Reporter of the Year" award and editorial writing award, the U.P.I. editors award for editorial writing and the APME award for editorial writing.
She is a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is president-elect of the National Conference of Editorial Writers. In 1987 she was named one of the most powerful women in Texas by the Texas Monthly.
Safire has been a political columnist for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times since 1973 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978.
His Sunday column, "On Language," has appeared in The New York Times Magazine since 1979 and has led to the publication of nine books.
Before joining The Times Safire was a senior speech writer for President Richard Nixon. He began his career as a reporter for a profiles column in The New York Herald Tribune and had worked as well as a radio and television producer and a U.S. Army correspondent.
He also has been a public relations executive, first as vice president of a firm in New York City, from 1955 to 1960, and then as the president of his own firm, Safire Public Relations Inc. He left in 1968 to join the Republican Presidential campaign. He worked on five Nixon campaigns and was responsible for bringing Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev together in the 1959 Moscow "kitchen" debate.
He is the author of Freedom (1987), a novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, the novel Full Disclosure (1977), a history of the pre-Watergate Nixon years titled Before the Fall (1974) and, with his late brother Len, three anthologies: Good Advice, World of Wisdom, and Leadership. He introduced and edited Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (1993). His new novel, Sleeper Spy, will be published in the fall.
Safire attended Syracuse University for two years and now serves on its board of trustees.