Investigative Journalism
Ricardo Sandoval-Palos is the Public Editor of the Public Broadcasting Service — the network’s liaison with its global audiences. His mission is to take on the most important questions, concerns and complaints about public television and its vast community of digital and broadcast storytellers.
Ricardo is ideally suited for this important role. He is an award-winning investigative reporter and multimedia editor who has helped shape reporting teams of nonprofit newsrooms, most recently the growing roster of contributors to the Puente News Collaborative. In 2019, Ricardo co-founded palabra, the first-of-its-kind digital magazine produced by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists as a publishing, training and mentoring platform for the association’s growing number of independent journalists. Today, palabra is recognized for fostering a legion of journalism talent: Four contributing writers and editors have won the Heising-Simons Foundation’s American Mosaic Journalism Prize for independent journalism; its writers and photographers have won regional and national journalism awards; and many of its contributors have gone on to win full-time jobs at regional and national news outlets.
Ricardo’s work at palabra underscored his prominent role as a newsroom adviser and mentor. His mentees have won Pulitzer Prizes. He’s been invited to help launch or restart influential nonprofit organizations such as the Independent News Network and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. And he’s counted on as an adviser to several nonprofits, including the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Journalism, Public Health Watch, and Altavoz Labs.
Ricardo is a former supervising editor of NPR’s signature Morning Edition broadcast, an editor with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Sacramento Bee. As a Latin America correspondent for the Dallas Morning News and the San Jose Mercury News, he won the Overseas Press Club and Inter-American Press Association awards for best coverage of Latin America. Early in his 45-year career, he was an investigative business reporter in California, covering corruption among politicians, bankers and public utility executives. Along the way, he co-wrote the award-winning biography The Fight in the Fields, which chronicled the farmworkers’ rights movement and the enigmatic Cesar Chavez.