“The most eloquent opinion voice to emerge at a Northwest newspaper in years. Jackson has written critically about proposed coal ports, honored accomplishments of the Endangered Species Act… and decried the decline in collegiality in politics.”
–Joel Connelly, “People to watch,” Seattlepi.com 1/2/2014
Peter Hardin Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from St. Albans School and Georgetown University.
Jackson cut his teeth at a Seattle-based, online-only enterprise, Crosscut.com. He wrote the Daily Scan, a compendium of local news, as well as original stories on local, state and national politics.
From 2012 until 2014, he served as the editorial page editor at The Daily Herald in Everett, Washington.
For five consecutive years, he won awards for online commentary or editorial writing from the NW chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2014 he won the Dolly Connelly Excellence in Environmental Journalism award. “In awarding the first place in the Dolly Connelly competition, judges cited “consistently exceptional” commentaries on environment topics, all of which were written by Peter Jackson, Daily Herald editorial page editor,” stated the announcement in The Herald.
In the 2000s, Jackson worked as a speechwriter for Governors Gary Locke and Christine Gregoire.
He was a VISTA Volunteer in Port Townsend, WA, and served for 8 years as a Commissioner on the Washington Commission for National and Community Service.
Jackson sat on the Advisory Board of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, an entity he helped create through an act of the Washington Legislature in 2009. He was also a board member of the North Cascades Institute and HistoryLink.org.
Peter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2016 and passed away on March 21, 2020. Jackson and his wife, Laurie Werner, established the Advancing Human Rights at Home Fund to support the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights in their work focused on human rights in the U.S.
You can read more about Peter’s life in these tributes:
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/peter-jackson-writer-and-scoops-son-dies-of-cancer-at-53/
https://crosscut.com/2020/03/remembering-crosscut-contributor-peter-jackson
https://jsis.washington.edu/news/in-memoriam-peter-jackson/
https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2020/03/23/in-memoriam-peter-jackson/
https://www.norwegianamerican.com/peter-hardin-jackson-1966-2020/
https://blog.ncascades.org/institute-news/in-memory-of-peter-hardin-jackson/
https://wawild.org/conservation-advocate-and-scribe-peter-jackson/