Nieman News

Lawrence G. Weiss, a 1949 Nieman Fellow who was a longtime editorial writer for The Denver Post before becoming a public affairs advisor, died in Boulder, Colorado on January 10. He was 97.

Weiss was an editorial writer for The Denver Post from 1958 until 1975, when he became a special assistant to the Governor of Colorado. He later served as the director of public affairs for the Colorado and Denver Bar Associations.

Born in Chicago in 1920, Weiss graduated from Harvard College magna cum laude in 1942. He began his journalism career at The Boston Herald, also working as a writer at The New York Times and a special assistant to the Secretary of Labor in Washington, D.C. before moving to Boulder in 1954. He taught journalism at the University of Colorado, where he was among the leaders of a faculty group that worked to eliminate discrimination against minorities in the school’s Greek life system. He continued teaching honors seminars at the school when he joined The Denver Post’s editorial page team in 1958. He stayed there for nearly two decades before leaving to become a special assistant to the governor in 1975. In 1977, he became director of public affairs for the Colorado and Denver Bar Associations and stayed there until his retirement in 1985.

Weiss is survived by his wife Rita as well as his daughter Carolyn and son Jonathan, as well as a sister, three grandchildren, and eight grand-children.

The Weiss family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard to support newspaper journalists.