Bio
Robert J. Lopez has combined an investigative reporting background with digital media skills to produce powerful multimedia projects for the Los Angeles Times. He has also has worked as a digital consultant for the Annenberg School for Communications at USC and the U.S. State Department, teaching digital journalism to USC graduate students and reporters and college students in Paraguay.
Lopez was part of a reporting team at The Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. He also was part of a team of Times journalists that won an Overseas Press Club award in 2002 for a series of articles on Islamic terrorist groups.
Lopez and a colleague were the first Times reporters to shoot and edit original video footage. That 2005 series, documenting how an L.A. street gang became a transnational criminal network, won an annual in-house editorial award for the best multimedia project. The judges called it a “groundbreaking” effort.
He has attended the Knight Foundation’s Digital Media Workshop at UC-Berkeley, as well as a weeklong video boot camp sponsored by The Times and various workshops focusing on digital media and computer-assisted reporting. He has produced videos for latimes.com and hoy.com, the Spanish-language affiliate of the L.A. Times. Lopez also is proficient in batch geocoding and converting Excel files to KML files for interactive Google mapping. He is currently a multimedia reporter for the Times’ City/County Bureau.
Lopez has reported on issues involving immigration, crime and corruption across the U.S. and in Mexico and Central America. Prior to The Times, he worked at the Oakland Tribune, where he co-authored an article exposing flaws in emergency procedures after a devastating urban wildfire. The article resulted in a state law requiring rescue agencies to coordinate tactics and radio communications during major disasters.
Lopez also authored a screenplay for an original movie bought by the FX Network, a true story of Latino immigrants killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom, which was based on a series he helped report and write for the newspaper. The series was honored as the Best Feature of 2004 by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
He has taught journalism workshops at the University of Hawaii and was an adjunct faculty member for five semesters at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Lopez also served as a digital consultant in 2008 for Annenberg journalism students pursing online graduate degrees. In addition, he taught digital journalism and investigative reporting in 2009 to reporters and college students in Paraguay as part of an international training program sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Lopez is a graduate of the University of Hawaii.
