Gene Roberts is an American journalist and professor of journalism. Roberts was executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1972 to 1990 and managing editor of The New York Times from 1994 to 1997.
Roberts is widely viewed by his peers as among the most influential of late 20th Century journalists. He is credited with reviving the Philadelphia Inquirer and leading it from a second-place daily to one of the best regional newspapers in the country. Largely, he did this by recruiting young, talented journalists and then giving them a free hand both in time and space to write compelling investigative stories under the tutelage of senior editors. Such nationally known writers as Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) and Richard Ben Cramer (What It Takes) worked at the Inquirer. Perhaps the most famous and longest lasting investigative team ever ... Jim Steele and Don Barlett ... flourished under Roberts. The Inquirer won 17 Pulitzer Prizes during his 18 years as executive editor.
Roberts grew up in North Carolina and worked for newspapers in Goldsboro,N.C., Norfolk, Va.. Raleigh, N.C. and Detroit. He covered the Kennedy Assassination in Dallas for the Detroit Free Press and also covered the civil rights movement as a correspondent for The New York Times, where he also served as Saigon bureau chief in 1968. Before heading The Philadelphia Inquirer, he went on to become national editor at the Times. Later, after retiring from his post at the Inquirer, he returned to the Times from 1994 to 1998 as managing editor.
Roberts has taught journalism from 1991 to 1994 and 1998 to the present at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
He is on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and served five years as its chairman; he also served as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board, the International Press Institute, and the Board Of Visitors of the School of Communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Roberts, along with co-author Hank Klibanoff (managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution), won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History for their book The Race Beat. In it, Roberts and Klibanoff chronicled the civil rights struggle in America and the role the press played in bringing it to the forefront. The book's major contributions included an analysis of Gunnar Myrdal and Ralph Bunche's seminal 1944 book, An American Dilemma, which outlined the problems and possible solutions to American segregation, and a close examination of the contribution of the black press to the Civil Rights movement.
Roberts received the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award for Distinguished Contributions to Journalism in 1993.
Roberts earned an associate's degree from Mars Hill College in North Carolina. He went on to receive his B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1954 and was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Roberts, Gene; and Klibanoff, Hank. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Knopf, 2006. (ISBN 978-0679403814)
The Censors and the Schools (with Jack Nelson). Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.(ISBN 978-0837196879)
Assignment America;: A collection of outstanding writing from the New York times (with David Jones) (ISBN 9780812903843)
Leaving Readers Behind (with Thomas Kunkel and Charles Layton) University of Arkansas Press, 2001. (ISBN 1557287716 )
