As Executive Director of The Center for Investigative Reporting, Robert J. Rosenthal engages and empowers the public through investigative journalism and groundbreaking storytelling in order to spark action, improve lives and protect our democracy. He comes to the position with decades of experience as an award-winning journalist. He began working as a reporter for the Boston Globe and moved on to The New York Times where he was an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer-Prize winning Pentagon Papers project. Rosenthal worked for 22 years at the Inquirer, starting as a reporter and eventually becoming its executive editor in 1998. He became managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2002, and joined The Center for Investigative Reporting as executive director in 2008.

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. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting.