David Zielenziger

David Zielenziger, who after being a foreign correspondent in Asia served as the first technology reporter for a fledgling Bloomberg Business News, and later devoted himself to civic engagement in his adopted community of Great Neck N.Y., died peacefully Tuesday at his home. He was 72.

Mr. Zielenziger, a proud 1974 graduate of Princeton University where he was chairman of the campus newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, joined The Baltimore Sun after college. Between 1978 and 1982, he was Kuala Lumpur bureau chief for the Asian Wall St Journal, where his reporting on political corruption earned him the enmity of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. He also spent a year as Canadian correspondent for The Dallas Morning News.

Returning to the United States, Mr. Zielenziger focused his reporting on the revolution taking place in semiconductors and computer software. He spent eight years writing about chips for Electronic Engineering Times, before joining Bloomberg in 1992 to cover technology companies like Intel, Oracle and IBM. After leaving Bloomberg in 2002, he worked for Newsweek, Thomson Reuters and other publications.

He was drawn to civic engagement and to aiding the powerless even as a teenager. An opponent of the war in Vietnam, he organized support for the upstart candidacy of Allard K. Lowenstein, the liberal Democrat who won a Long Island congressional seat in 1968. At age 20, he attended the Democratic National Convention in Miami as an elected delegate pledged to Sen. George McGovern.

In addition to being an active member of his synagogue, Mr. Zielenziger also believed local politics demanded scrutiny. He ran unsuccessfully for library trustee, and regularly attended local council and zoning meetings in Great Neck to expose waste, favoritism and corruption. He had, as a former Bloomberg colleague noted, “a fierce sense of right and wrong.”

He is preceded in death by his parents, Eric and Ruth (Herrmann) Zielenziger and survived by his brother, Michael Zielenziger (Diane Abt) of Oakland, CA and Manhattan.

Funeral services will be held Friday, May 23 at 1 pm at Riverside-Nassau North Chapels, 55 N. Station Plaza, Great Neck, with burial to follow at Beth Moses Cemetery. A shivah will be held on Sunday at 6:30 pm at Temple Israel, 108 Old Mill Road, Great Neck. Contributions in his memory can be made to the National Ramah Commission of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York NY or the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton University, Princeton NJ.