Robert Rosenthal
Board Member, Executive Producer, Acting CEO, The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR)
2021, 2022
Robert Rosenthal has been a journalist for six decades. He is currently on the boards or an advisor to nonprofits including The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Human Rights Center at Berkeley. Now Rosenthal is on the board of the Center for Investigative Reporting. He was CIR’s executive director from 2008 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 nearly 50 year career in journalism at The Philadelphia Inquirer, starting as a reporter, and a foreign correspondent 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 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 reporting awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting. In 2018 Rosenthal was named a Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists for his “extraordinary contribution to the profession of journalism.”
The Summit offers a unique opportunity to confront the corrosive influence of bigotry and hatred in our society. In order for us to address these challenges, we first must acknowledge their painful and destructive impact in our communities and in our country. I am grateful to serve as a Global Advisor to this timely and powerful initiative.
