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Robert J. Rosenthal
Chief Executive Officer
Robert J. Rosenthal is the chief executive officer at The Center for Investigative Reporting. Rosenthal was the executive director of CIR from January 2008 to spring 2017. When he joined CIR, it had a staff of seven and when he left, it had a staff of nearly 70 and was recognized as one of the leading nonprofit newsrooms in the country. He is an award-winning journalist and worked for some of the most respected newspapers in the country, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle. Rosenthal worked for 22 years at The Inquirer, starting as a reporter and eventually becoming its executive editor in 1998. He became managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2002 and left in 2007. During this time, he led the investigation into the murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey. That work became known as the award-winning Chauncey Bailey Project. Before joining The Inquirer in 1979, Rosenthal worked for six years as a reporter at The Boston Globe and three and a half years at The New York Times, where he was a news assistant on the foreign desk and an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pentagon Papers project. As a reporter, Rosenthal won numerous awards, including the Overseas Press Club Award for magazine writing, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World reporting. He was a Pulitzer finalist in international reporting and was a Pulitzer judge four times. He has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Rosenthal is also currently advising or on the board of multiple journalism nonprofits. In 2018, Rosenthal was named a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists for his “extraordinary contribution to the profession of journalism.”
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After months of hard work, Califoria Watch and USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism will launch a multi-part series Friday on hunger in California.
No let up in the pace at California Watch
We’re airborne, and this is a jamming little office here at California Watch. Jamming and cramming in our too small digs. Thankfully, we are moving in two weeks.
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My time on the Pentagon Papers
CIR co-presents screenings of the Ellsberg doc, Most Dangerous Man in America.
Major new nonprofit news initiative for the Bay Area
New initiative is a shot in the arm for journalism and for the Bay Area
Fast Flip, our new experiment with Google
CIR is part of Google’s new Fast Flip tool, with opportunity for revenue sharing