2026 Nominees for Journalism & Media

NATE CHINEN, b. 1976, has been writing about jazz since 1996, is currently editorial director of WRTI (Philadelphia) and formerly director of editorial content at WBGO (Newark), also reporting on NPR. Active on social media and with a Substack column titled The Gig (based on his longtime column at the former JazzTimes), Nate is the author of Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, and co-authored George Wein’s autobiography Myself Among Others: A Life in Music. He’s been a critic at the New York Times, the Village Voice and Philadelphia City Paper, published in national magazines, and has won the JJA’s Helen Oakley Dance – Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing 13 times. He’s recently been teaching a podcast workshop at University of Pennsylvania.

DAN OUELLETTE, b. 19??, has written about jazz in DownBeat for more than 35 years, as well as for Qwest.tv, Medium, Billboard, Variety Muck Rack and many other publications. His books include The Landfill Chronicles (Cymbal Press, published March 2024), the Ron Carter biography Finding the Right Notes, and Bruce Lundvall’s biography Playing by Ear (published by ArtistShare). Dan is a web-producer and jazz festival curator of artist interviews. He’s maintained a column, Jazz & Beyond Intel, now at danouellette.net, for 16 years.

BEN RATLIFF,  b. 1968, was jazz and pop critic for the New York Times 1996-2016, and is the author of five books. including Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and most recently Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening (2025, long-listed for the 2025 National Book Award for nonfiction, and the 2026 PEN/Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay). Ben’s work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, 4Columns, Pitchfork, npr.org, Slate, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Guardian, Village Voice, Coda, Granta, Bookforum, Jazz Times, Wire. and he is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

ZAN STEWART, b. 1944, devoted himself to jazz journalism from 1975 to 2010, when he gave up that good life to focus exclusively on making music — he’s been playing saxophone since 1960, and led bands starting in ’67, as well as collaborating with well-known musicians. Today he gigs and teaches, based in San Francisco’s East Bay. While more specifically involved in his writing career, Zan was published in the Los Angeles Time, Newark Star-Ledger and DownBeat, among other periodicals, and earned the Deems Taylor Award for his biographical essay used as liner notes for Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings.