Robert Rosenthal began his career in journalism at The New York Times, where he was a news assistant on the foreign desk and an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer-Prize winning Pentagon Papers project. He later worked at the Boston Globe, and for 22 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, starting as a reporter and eventually becoming its executive editor in 1998. He became managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2002, and joined the Center for Investigative Reporting as executive director in 2008.