Brooks retiring from LA Times after 42 years

Nancy Rivera Brooks, deputy business editor of the Los Angeles Times, is retiring from the newspaper after 42 years.

Rivera Brooks has shaped the business desk’s culture and coverage. Staffers across the newsroom turn to Rivera Brooks for her keen understanding of economics, real estate and the environment. Reporters throughout the department adore her kind management style and her brilliant line editing.

A member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Hall of Fame, she has long had a hand in marquee work, as a reporter on The Times’ 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on Latinos in Southern California and as an editor of this year’s Repowering the West project.

Times columnist Sammy Roth writes:

She’s edited on the business desk since 2004, helping countless reporters — I guess we could count them, but who’s got time? — ask better questions, write sharper sentences and tell more meaningful stories. Her guidance has been especially valuable for me personally, as far as I’m concerned, because before becoming an editor she was an energy reporter like me. So when I file stories about the electric grid and utility regulation and community choice aggregation, she knows exactly what I’m trying to say.

Last year, she received the 2023 Lawrence Minard Editor Award from the Gerald Loeb Awards.

Rivera Brooks was part of a team of nine Los Angeles Times business reporters and editors who won a Loeb Award in 1985 for coverage of corporate takeovers. In 2022, she was named one of California’s most influential Latina journalists by the California Chicano News Media Association.