[1] A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was a senior writer and foreign correspondent for The Oregonian, working for the Portland, Oregon newspaper from 1981 to 1986 and 1989 until 2016.
He won his first Pulitzer[2] in 1999, The Oregonian's first in 42 years, for explaining the Asian financial crisis by following a container of french fries from a Northwest farm to the Far East, in a series[3] that ended with riots presaging the Fall of Suharto.
[12] In 2016, Read joined the public-interest investigative reporting team at NerdWallet,[13] a San Francisco company that helps consumers navigate personal finance.
[15] In 2019, Read became a national reporter and Seattle bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, covering Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and Hawaii.
[16] A story[17] by Read the next year on a super-spreading event early in the coronavirus pandemic gained a record online readership of more than 8 million, reporting on the deaths of two Skagit Valley Chorale members after a rehearsal on March 10, 2020.
According to a New York Times Sunday magazine article,[18] the story attracted the attention of researchers who went on to study the incident and prove that Covid-19 spread through the air via respiratory aerosols—not merely via droplets and surface contact.
Scientists from 32 countries cited the choir incident as a prime example of airborne contagion when they urged the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control to acknowledge aerosols as a transmission route.
[21] Read won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 1999[22] for a series that dramatized the global effects of the Asian financial crisis through the movement of a container of french fries from a Washington-state farm to a McDonald's restaurant in Singapore.
[28] He won first-place awards for reporting on social issues (2001, 2005), business (1998, 2004, 2011), spot news (1997), education (1990) from the Pacific Northwest Society of Professional Journalists.
[45] Role in explanatory journalism described by Lewis M. Simons in "Breach of Faith: A Crisis of Coverage in the Age of Corporate Newspapering," edited by Gene Roberts and Thomas Kunkel.
[48][49] Article[50] on a Covid-19 super-spreading event cited May 1, 2020, as evidence that the coronavirus spreads via air—in the scientific journal Indoor Air, "Transmission of SARS‐CoV‐2 by inhalation of respiratory aerosol in the Skagit Valley Chorale superspreading event," [51] and the research publication Risk Analysis, Sept. 26, 2020, "Consideration of the Aerosol Transmission for COVID‐19 and Public Health.