Robert J. Lopez is a fellow at the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University New York. For years, he was an investigative journalist at the Los Angeles Times, where he was part of a team awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for uncovering corruption in Bell, a small city near Los Angeles. He and several Times colleagues were Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2023 for investigations detailing corruption, criminality and worker exploitation in California’s legal cannabis industry. During his reporting career, he has covered issues involving crime, corruption and immigration in Central America and Mexico and across the U.S.  

He took a break from journalism for several years while serving as the associate vice president for communications and public affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. He also has been an adjunct faculty member at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California. He taught news writing and investigative reporting to undergraduates.

He has also been a media speaker for the U.S. State Department, teaching social media skills to professional journalists, university students and professors in Paraguay, the Bahamas and Middle East as part of a program that was sponsored by the U.S. State Department. 

 

Prior to the Los Angeles Times,  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.

He is a graduate of the University of Hawaii.