Bob Sipchen

Bob Sipchen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and currently the Communications Director of the Sierra Club, America's oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. Sipchen writes for and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Sierra magazine, a national publication with a circulation of approximately 600,000. As Associate Editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages he, along with colleague Alex Raskin, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Their series explored "the issues and dilemmas provoked by mentally ill people dwelling on the streets," and also won the Society of Professional Journalists' highest award, the Sigma Delta Chi. Sipchen also shared in the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for the Times team coverage of the Los Angeles riots.

Sipchen, who paid his way through college as a hotshot wildland firefighter and patrolman with the U.S. Forest Service, was graduated cum laude from the University of California, Santa Barbara, which granted him the school's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006. At UCSB,he was a student and protégé of influential journalist and educator Barry Farrell (journalist)Barry Farrell

His career at the Times included serving as editor of the Sunday Opinion section and senior editor of the Times's Sunday magazine. He led the team of journalists that created the newspaper's popular Outdoors section in print and on the web. As a reporter he covered the riots that erupted in Los Angeles following the trial of police officers involved in the beating of motorist Rodney King and shared in the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize for that reportage. Sipchen published the first profile of Reginald Denny, the motorist whose televised beating on the corner of Florence and Normandy became an icon of the inchoate rage vented during the riots.

Sipchen also wrote about cultural issues, politics, covered a presidential campaign and wrote a column for the Times about the magazine industry. In 1997, Sipchen loaded his wife and three children into a 26-foot motorhome and drove 22,000 miles through 46 states, including Alaska, writing twice-a-week columns about the state of the American family. In 2003, he wrote a personal essay about watching Southern California's devastating wildfires destroy his childhood home. In 2006 he created the "School Me" column and multi-media "School Me!" blog which explored education issues.

Sipchen left the Los Angeles Times in 2007 to edit the 110-year-old Sierra magazine. In 2009 he was promoted to Communications Director for the organization, overseeing a national staff of about 60 multi-media professionals responsible for the Club's messaging, branding, advocacy journalism, social media, and press and public relations.

An adjunct professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles since 1997, Sipchen teaches news writing in the fall and narrative non-fiction in the spring, using a team teaching approach that has included as many as eight Pulitzer Prize winning journalists in a calendar year.

Sipchen served on the advisory committee of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Published works

Besides his newspaper articles and columns, Sipchen has written for many national magazines and is the author of * Baby Insane and the Buddha, published in hard cover in December 1992 by Doubleday (ISBN 978-0-385-41997-0) and in paperback in November 1993, a nonfiction account of gang violence in southern California. The New York Times book review praised Sipchen's book as "first rate," adding "Sipchen's supple, muscular prose gives the book the sweep and narrative pacing of a novel."