Bloomberg ME joins Pulitzer board

Robert Blau, a managing editor at Bloomberg News, has been elected to the Pulitzer Prize board.

He replaces Amanda Bennett, an executive editor at Bloomberg.

Blau is managing editor for projects and investigations at Bloomberg, which he joined in 2008. He served as managing editor of The Baltimore Sunfrom 2004 to 2008. Prior to that, he worked as a reporter and editor at the Chicago Tribune, supervising some of the paper’s most prominent work, which included a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for Explanatory Reporting.

After a stint as a freelancer writing about music, Blau was hired in 1985 by the Chicago Tribune, where his first job was reviewing the movies that Gene Siskel, the paper’s famed critic, didn’t want to. He moved on to the crime beat, capturing the experience in a memoir, The Cop Shop. Later, as an investigative reporter, he covered everything from mobsters in Chicago to the plight of impoverished children in Cambodia.

A series he designed on population issues, “Gambling with Life,” including his portrait of a Chicago mother of 13 children, won the Overseas Press Club award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His inaugural editing job was reinventing the paper’s opinion section as a home for first-person narrative, from an account of one family’s alcoholism to Saul Bellow’s reconstruction of the Democratic conventions of his youth.

Following a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1997, Blau assembled the Tribune’sprojects team, which produced a burst of outstanding work. The team’s body of work on the criminal-justice system was largely responsible for the moratorium on capital punishment in Illinois, won numerous national awards and sparked similar investigations across the country. “Gateway to Gridlock,” about the failures of the airline industry, was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Another multi-part narrative traced the fatal trajectory of a single pane of glass that fell from a Chicago skyscraper. And a project portrayed the final days of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Each was a Pulitzer finalist.

While Blau served as managing editor of The Baltimore Sun, the paper produced a steady stream of investigative work, collecting dozens of honors including the George Polk Award, the Meyer Berger Award, the Loeb Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Prize. An investigation into Baltimore’s system of “ground rent” was a Pulitzer finalist in Local Reporting.