Thought Leader: Raul Ramirez

Raul Ramirez is KQED Public Radio’s Executive Director for News and Public Affairs.  As News Director at KQED since 1991, he led the launching of KQED Radio’s statewide news service, The California Report, of the nationally distributed Asian-Pacific program, Pacific Time, and other locally produced programs.   He has worked as reporter for The Miami Herald and The Washington Post and as a reporter and editor for the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner, where he was editor of the paper’s Investigative Team.  He is former President of the Board of the Center for Investigative Reporting and has won numerous awards for local, national and international reporting, including a Thomas Storke award from the World Affairs Council of Northern California for his reporting on a family’s journey from rural Guandong Province in China to the San Francisco area, and a 1989 Penney-Missouri award as a co-editor of the San Francisco Examiner’s unique series on “Gay in America.”  He has reported from Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Mexico, Japan, Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

In 1999, he received a career achievement award from the Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California for his print and broadcast work.  He is a former Fellow in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii’s Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and a 1994 Fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.  He has taught journalism courses at San Francisco State University since 1983.  He also has taught at the University of California at Berkeley has been a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute in Media Studies, where he was an Ethics Fellow.  He has served on visiting on-site evaluation teams for the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications at universities in Kentucky, Ohio, Georgia, New Mexico, Utah and California.

Raul Ramirez was a principal writer for the seminal UNITY national conference analysis of U.S. media coverage of ethnic and racial minorities, and frequently lectures on topics related to diversity and news media.  He has led investigative reporting and civic journalism training workshops at the European Journalism Center in The Netherlands and has led training workshops in several Ukrainian locations in collaboration with the Journalists’ Initiative Association of Kharkiv, Ukraine.  He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Regional Media and Information, a non-profit organization created by Ukrainian and Western European journalists to aid and promote the development of independent media in Ukraine.  He is a founding board member of the Latino Public Radio Consortium.

Raul has written the essay, The Value of Voice as part of the IVOH Voices & Values of Journalism Project - listen to and read the entire collection of essays here.

Raul's recent work and related links:

• KQED Public Radio