Blau, Robert

Robert Blau is managing editor for projects and investigations at Bloomberg News, a global newsgathering organization.

Blau has carved an eclectic path up the journalistic ranks. After a stint as a freelancer writing about music, he was hired in 1985 by the Chicago Tribune, where his first job was reviewing the movies that Gene Siskel, the paper’s famed critic, didn’t want to. He moved on to the crime beat, capturing the experience in a memoir, The Cop Shop. Later, as an investigative reporter, he covered everything from mobsters in Chicago to the plight of impoverished children in Cambodia. A series he designed on population issues, "Gambling with Life," including his portrait of a Chicago mother of 13 children, won the Overseas Press Club award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His inaugural editing job was reinventing the paper’s opinion section as a home for first-person narrative, from an account of one family's alcoholism to Saul Bellow’s reconstruction of the Democratic conventions of his youth.

Following a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1997, Blau assembled the Tribune’s projects team, which produced a burst of outstanding work. The team’s body of work on the criminal-justice system was largely responsible for the moratorium on capital punishment in Illinois, won numerous national awards and sparked similar investigations across the country. "Gateway to Gridlock," about the failures of the airline industry, was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Another multi-part narrative traced the fatal trajectory of a single pane of glass that fell from a Chicago skyscraper. And a project portrayed the final days of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Each was a Pulitzer finalist.

While Blau served as managing editor of The Baltimore Sun, the paper produced a steady stream of investigative work, collecting dozens of honors including the George Polk Award, the Meyer Berger Award, the Loeb Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Prize. An investigation into Baltimore’s system of "ground rent" was a Pulitzer finalist in Local Reporting.

Blau also reorganized the Sun newsroom for the Internet and helped establish a Web-first newsgathering operation.

Blau joined Bloomberg News in 2008, and has helped lead its push into global public-service journalism. Its investigations have forced unprecedented transparency from the Federal Reserve, documented the unanticipated ripples of the Lehman Brothers collapse, explored the human cost of the gold-mining industry and tallied the economic and emotional price of end-of-life health care.

Blau, a native of New York City, received his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Albany, where he studied literature and journalism with novelist William Kennedy. He earned his master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1985. He was a Pulitzer juror in 2010 on the Investigative Reporting jury, and chaired the Public Service jury’s deliberations in 2011.

Blau is married to Leah Eskin, a food columnist. They have two children, Hannah and Noah. The family lives in Baltimore.

Blau joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in Fall, 2011.