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 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 in Editorial Writing for the Times coverage of the Los Angeles riots.

Biography

Sipchen, who paid his way through college as a "Hot Shot" 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. His career at the Times included serving as editor of the Sunday Opinion section and senior editor of the Times's Sunday magazine. He lead 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. He 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 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 National Communications Director for the organization, overseeing a staff of more than three dozen professionals responsible for the Club's messaging, branding and media 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 serves on the advisory committee of Columbia University's Hechinger Foundation for Education Journalism's Hechinger Report.

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."