Peter Lance - Early Career

Early Career

Lance began his journalism career as a cub reporter for The Newport Daily News while a student at Northeastern University. In his second summer with the paper he researched and reported a four part investigative series on slum housing in Newport that won the 11th Annual Sevellon Brown Award given by the New England Associated Press Managing Editor’s Association.

Working as a researcher for Ralph Nader’s Center for The Study of Responsive Law, Lance spent one month each living with the families of a brick layer, a garbage collector and a policeman in Boston as part of a study that was published as The Workers: Portraits of Nine American Job Holders. Lance contributed research and writing to the book, authored by Kenneth Lasson. Retrieved Aug 29, 2012. The Workers was one of dozens of books and reports produced during Nader’s summer “task forces” from 1969–72, the interns of which came to be known as “Nader’s Raiders".

In 1972, after graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Lance worked as the assistant to the program director at WNET-TV, the PBS flagship station in New York. He soon began producing for “The 51st State” a nightly news magazine where he won the first of his two New York Area Emmy awards for The Great American Land Hustle Part One.

In 1973 Lance moved to WABC-TV, where he won a second New York Area Emmy, the National Station Emmy, and The Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for “The Willowbrook Case: The People vs.The State of New York.

In 1975, while working as a news producer at WABC-TV, Lance attended Fordham University School of Law as a night student. Studying at NYU Law School in the summer of 1977 he graduated from Fordham with a J.D. in 1978.