Rick Rodriguez, Southwest Borderlands Initiative Professor, Professor of Practice

Rick Rodriguez is the former executive editor and senior vice president of The Sacramento Bee, who joined the Cronkite School as the professor of the Southwest Borderlands Initiative, in March 2008. Rodriguez’s charge at ASU is to develop a specialty in in-depth reporting on Latino and borderland issues. He is also working on the News21 project in which students develop alternative ways of telling in-depth stories.

During his more than nine years as The Bee’s top editor, his staff won many of the country’s most prestigious journalism awards. They include the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2007, the George Polk award for investigative reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, National Headliner’s award, Sigma Delta Chi, Overseas Press Club, American Society of Newspaper Editors diversity writing award, Harvard Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers, Heywood Broun Award, Inter-American Press Association award, National Press Photographer’s Award, World Hunger Award, the EPPY award for online project journalism and many others.

Rodriguez was managing editor for five years prior to becoming executive editor of The Bee where he worked as an assistant managing editor, recruiter, columnist, projects editor, editorial writer, deputy Capitol bureau chief and reporter during a 25-year career there. He also was a reporter at The Fresno Bee and The Salinas Californian. He was the first Latino to serve as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He is a graduate of Stanford University.