User talk:Thomas Plate

Thomas Plate
Overview

Thomas Gordon Plate (born May 17th 1944) is an internationally syndicated columnist, author, university professor and founder of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA and the Pacific Perspectives Media Center in Beverly Hills, California. Over the last dozen years, Plate’s regular newspaper and web-paper column “Pacific Perspectives” has appeared and continues to run in many major newspapers the world over including; The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, The Straits Times in Singapore, The Khaleej Times out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, The Japan Times in Tokyo, The Korea Times in South Korea, The Jakarta Post, The Seattle Times, The Providence Journal, The San Diego Business Journal and others. The collective circulation of these core newspapers is well into many millions.

Plate is the author of six books and has been a journalist at Time, Newsday, New York Magazine, CBS and The Daily Mail of London, where he served as guest American editor. He was Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times (1989-95) and has won major journalism awards, including from The American Society of Newspaper Editors (Deadline Writing). In addition to his 14 previous years as an undergraduate adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Plate has lectured around the globe at universities such as Princeton, the University of Hawaii, UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, Melbourne University in Australia and California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California. He has been a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Plate writes and lectures about media ethics, government ethics, and international politics surrounding the Asia Pacific region. He is currently working on a major nonfiction book about Asia, in addition to two novels. Plate can be heard on radio as an occasional BBC commentator.

Biography
Early Life

Plate was born in New York City, where he lived with his parents and younger sister Maureen until the age of five, when his family moved to Long Island. He attended public schools on Long Island before transferring to the Franciscan Preparatory Seminary in Pennsylvania. He was sixteen. Plate eventually left the seminary and entered Walt Whitman High School on Long Island. Back at school, he starred in stage productions with the theater club, performed as a concert clarinetist and became an editor of the school paper, The Whitman Window. He graduated from high school and left Long Island in 1962.

Career

Plate’s early beginnings initiated what would become a long and dynamic career in journalism. As an undergraduate studying political science at Amherst College, Plate became Managing Editor of the Amherst Student. After earning his bachelor’s in political science, Phi Beta Kappa, from Amherst in 1966, he continued his studies at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. There, Plate served on the editorial board of the Woodrow Wilson School student policy review and earned his master’s degree in Public and International Affairs from Princeton in 1969.

Publications
During his years at Amherst and Princeton, Plate worked as a campus correspondent at Newsweek and the Washington Post. He also interned at both media institutions, as well as at the United States State Department in Washington as a speechwriter between Amherst and Princeton.

In 1970 he wrote his first book Understanding Doomsday: A Guide to the Nuclear Arms Race for Hawks, Doves and People, and then embarked upon the first leg of a peripatetic journalist career: Newsday (Long Island, under David Laventhol), New York Magazine (under Clay Felker), the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (under James Bellows), where the Greater Los Angeles Press Club awarded him the Best Editorial award three years running: The Daily Mail of London (under Sir David English); New York Newsday (under Don Forst); and Time magazine (under Ray Cave). In 1989, Plate moved from New York City to Los Angeles. He was joined the next year by his wife Andrea, finishing up a teaching appointment at Fordham University (they had been married on September 22nd 1979) and their only child Ashley, born on September 5th 1986. The family settled in Santa Monica and eventually Beverly Hills, California.

In Los Angeles, from the end of 1989 to the fall of 1995, Plate was Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times. In this position he supervised the daily editorial and op-ed pages, as well as the Sunday OPINION section. While there, these sections garnered significant professional recognition, including awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (three times) and national newspaper design awards. His significant hires included the late Robert Reinhold of The New York Times.

Published Works

Plate has written six books including his latest, Confessions of an American Media Man (with Marshall Cavendish). This was a bestseller in Asia, according to charts published by The Straits Times of Singapore. After his first work, Understanding Doomsday: A Guide to the Arms Race for Hawks, Doves and People (Simon and Schuster, 1970); he wrote Crime Pays (Simon and Schuster, 1975); then Commissioner (with Patrick V. Murphy, Simon and Schuster, 1977); The Only Way to Go, (under the alias “Alex Royce,” Dell, 1981); Secret Police (with Andrea Darvi Plate, Doubleday, 1981); and most recently Confessions of an American Media Man (Marshall Cavendish, 2007).

Academia
From 1994 to 2008, Professor Plate taught undergraduate courses in media, ethics and Asian politics at the University of California, Los Angeles. While at UCLA, he founded the campus-based non-profit Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) for educators, journalists, media professionals, government and business officials concerned with regionally common issues, controversies and opportunities between America and the Pacific Rim. It publishes the online magazines Asia Media and Asia Pacific Arts. Plate also founded the Pacific Perspectives Media Center (PPMC), located in Beverly Hills, which seeks to highlight major themes of Asia-Pacific cooperation and controversy through the works of major media and academic personalities.

World Affairs Affiliations

Professor Plate is a member of the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council on International Policy, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, the Princeton Club of New York, the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Century Association. He has been a Media Fellow at Stanford University and a fellow in Tokyo at the Japanese Foreign Press Center’s annual Asia-Pacific Media Conference. He has been listed in Who’s Who in America and had been an ongoing participant at the annual retreat of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.