Robert J. Lopez
Robert J. Lopez is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He was part of a reporting team at The Times awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing government corruption in Bell, a small city southeast of Los Angeles. He and several Times colleagues were Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2023 for investigations that uncovered corruption, criminality and worker exploitation in California’s legal cannabis market. He also worked at California State University, Los Angeles, where he was the associate vice president for communications and public affairs. He has taught social media and journalism classes for reporters, students and academics in the United States, South America, the Caribbean and Middle East.
Lopez also helped direct the L.A. Now blog for The Times, taking on a pioneering role in moving the paper toward becoming a digital publication. He produced multimedia reports for the popular breaking-news blog and taught other journalists in the newsroom how to use their phones to take videos for their online news posts.
He attended the Knight Foundation’s Digital Media Workshop at UC-Berkeley, as well as other multimedia boot camps. As a reporter, Lopez has investigated issues involving immigration, crime and corruption across the U.S. and in Mexico and Central America. He was part of a group of Times reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. 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.
He is a graduate of the University of Hawaii.