Robert J. Rosenthal joined The San Francisco Chronicle as managing editor and vice president in October of 2002. Prior to joining The Chronicle, Rosenthal was editor and executive vice president of The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was a member of The InquirerÌøåÀå_s staff for 22 years, in a variety of roles – reporter, foreign correspondent, city editor, foreign editor, and associate managing editor. From 1982 through 1986, he was The InquirerÌøåÀå_s Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya.

He worked in 25 countries in Africa as well as Israel and Lebanon. He covered the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and spent three months in Beirut in 1983-84. Before joining The Inquirer in 1979, Rosenthal worked for six years at the Boston Globe as a reporter, and three-and-a-half years at the New York Times as a news assistant on the foreign desk. He was an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pentagon Papers project.

He has received numerous journalism awards, including the Overseas Press Club award for magazine writing; the National Sigma Delta Chi award for distinguished foreign correspondence for reporting from South Africa; the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World Reporting; and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting. He has served as a Pulitzer Prize judge 3 times, and has been an adjunct professor at Columbia UniversityÌøåÀå_s Graduate School.