About

R.B. Brenner has spent much of his adult life in newsrooms. He held several top editing positions at The Washington Post, including Sunday Editor, Metro Editor and Deputy Universal News Editor. He was one of the primary editors of The Post’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

He left The Post newsroom for a Stanford University classroom in 2011. While teaching public issues reporting, he helped students and faculty launch the Peninsula Press, a multimedia website covering news in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.

He also teaches courses on digital journalism and nonfiction narrative writing.

A graduate of Oberlin College, R.B. has been an Ethics Fellow at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, where he is now an adjunct faculty member; the Eugene S. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University; and a journalist in residence at the University of Texas at Austin, which honored him with the DeWitt Carter Reddick Award.

He worked with actors Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren and Rachel McAdams as the journalism consultant for the film State of Play, in which he has a cameo speaking role.

He began his reporting career at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina and then worked at newspapers in Florida and California before joining The Washington Post as an editor in 2002.