Nancy Rivera Brooks, deputy business editor at the Los Angeles Times, will receive the 2023 Lawrence Minard Editor Award from the Gerald Loeb Awards.
Created in memory of Lawrence “Laury” Minard, founding editor of Forbes Global and a former final judge for the Loeb Awards, this award honors excellence in business, financial and economic journalism editing. It recognizes an editor whose work does not often receive public recognition.
In 1983, early in Rivera Brooks’ career with the Times, she wrote stories about Latino workers and entrepreneurs as part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning project on Southern California’s Latino community. Over the next 40 years, while covering nearly every industry, she became an essential part of improving the outlet’s reflection of the needs and interests of the people of Los Angeles by working to bring much-needed diversity to the business section’s coverage and its staff.
As an editor, she has mentored countless reporters on the nuances of the energy industry, supply chain, gas prices and California’s labor regulations. She has been the guiding hand behind two of the outlet’s most successful and durable editorial franchises focusing on Southern California’s luxury real estate market as well as climate issues across the American West and the globe. She is currently leading an intensive collaboration across multiple audience teams to create the award-winning “Repowering the West” series that explores the issues around the transition to clean energy.
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. She was inducted into the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Hall of Fame in 2017. In 2022, she was named one of California’s most influential Latina journalists by the California Chicano News Media Association.
Born and reared in Los Angeles, she graduated from California State University, Northridge, with a degree in journalism.