Robert Lopez will be surfing tomorrow — his first day back in the islands after a more than 12-year absence.
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What: Mobility and Diversity in the Media: From Ka Leo to Los Angeles Times I-Team When: Sept. 17 at 1:30 p.m. Where: Marine Science Building, Room 100 |
The Los Angeles Times investigative reporter and former Ka Leo staff writer, headed here for a series of lectures and discussions with University of Hawai'i students, plans to spend his first hours and days back on O'ahu reminiscing at old haunts — North Shore's Punalu'u among them — with old friends, including former Ka Leo City Editor Gordon Pang (now a Honolulu Star-Bulletin public affairs reporter) and former Ka Leo staff writer Craig Gima (now a Honolulu Star-Bulletin editor and reporter).
But Lopez's return visit to Hawai'i won't be all sea, surf and saloon. His real aim here is to stress to students of all fields and backgrounds that "if I was able to do it" — go from Ka Leo to the L.A. Times — "certainly" anyone can do it.
Lopez, 44, born and raised in California, graduated in 1989 from the University of Hawai'i with highest honors in journalism. Before enrolling at UH at 24, Lopez was a firefighter in the Marshall Islands for four years, a job he got by responding to a classified ad in a Honolulu daily.
At a lecture on Tuesday, called "Mobility and Diversity in the Media: From Ka Leo to Los Angeles I-Team," Lopez, a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) and Chicano News Media Association, plans to shy away from himself and focus on diversity in and outside of the newsroom. "The message isn't going to be about me," he said, but it is going to center on what he has done.
Lopez's original undergraduate plans did not include journalism. "I majored in journalism because it was good prep for law school," he said, and even considered entering law school after studying at the University of California-Berkeley in their Graduate of the Summer Program for Minority Journalists.
Lopez, a senior staff writer at Ka Leo for about four semesters, covered such exclusive stories as sex in library bathrooms (and what UH officials were doing about it) to the War on Drugs (and how Hawai'i was losing it).
As a writer for Ka Leo and a journalism student, Lopez learned many of the reporting and fact finding skills he uses to this day, he said.
"It (UH) was a great school, a great university. (But) it wasn't just the school. Honolulu in many ways is very cosmopolitan. People of Hawai'i as well." Lopez said that while in Hawai'i, his knowledge of the Asia and Pacific Island cultures grew; but while at UH, his interest with open records and public affairs reporting was piqued.
"You get out of it (any education) what you put into it."
From Berkeley's minority journalism program, Lopez was placed at the Oakland Tribune as part of his fellowship. He started at the small, progressive metro daily in 1989 (only months after graduating from UH) and moved to the Los Angeles Times three years later. At the Tribune, a "snappy underdog paper" with a diverse staff and an African-American publisher, Lopez covered the police and higher education beats.
Also while there, he co-wrote an article about the Oakland Fire Department, following a deadly wildfire that killed 28. The article, which outlined how the department failed to use a common emergency radio vocabulary during the height of the fire, led to a California law requiring rescue agencies to use common radio communications, according to Lopez's resume.
After courting the Los Angeles Times for a number of years and while still "flirting with the idea of law school," Lopez was taken on as a reporter at the Times' inner city office in 1992. This August he celebrated his 10th anniversary there.
As an investigative writer for the Times, Lopez can spend up to a year on a story or a series of stories. A recently published investigative piece co-written by Lopez, for example, details in length how Islamic-American nonprofit organizations are garnering increased scrutiny as some may have links to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
Lopez will take a break from months-long-in-the-making pieces for major spot news stories like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., he said.
As part of the staff of the Los Angeles Times, Lopez won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for local reporting on spot news for coverage of the first day of the Northridge Earthquakes. Lopez has also won awards from the Los Angeles Press Club and NAHJ.
After 13 years in journalism, Lopez has forgotten his aspirations of continuing into law school because "people read the newspaper (and) people react to the newspaper," even if reporting was "something he fell into."
Lopez's wife and two children will not be accompanying him to the islands, Lopez said, which will dampen, if only slightly, that avid surfer's time at the beach.
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