Robert J. Rosenthal

Bio

Robert J. Rosenthal is an Advisory Board Member with the Human Rights Center. He is currently a board member and executive producer at The Center for Investigative Reporting. He joined CIR as executive director in 2008, a position he held until 2017. When Rosenthal joined CIR it had a staff of 7. When he stepped down as Executive Director CIR had a staff of over  70 and was widely recognized for the quality and credibility of its journalism and its constant innovation around storytelling and distribution. Rosenthal spent the bulk of his 50 year career in journalism  at The Philadelphia Inquirer, starting as a reporter and becoming its executive editor in 1998. He became managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002. Before joining the Inquirer in 1979, Rosenthal worked as a reporter for The Boston Globe and 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 Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World Reporting. Rosenthal has been a Pulitzer Prize judge four times and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting. Rosenthal is also currently on the board or advising 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.”