Bob Greene, Pioneering Investigative Reporter, Dies

[THUNDER HANDS]

Source: Newsday

BY MELANIE LEFKOWITZ AND STEVE WICK | [e-mail]
[e-mail]
4:45 PM EDT, April 10, 2008

Robert W. Greene, a pioneering investigative reporter and editor who helped Newsday twice win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and who left an indelible imprint on a newspaper whose reporting mission he deeply believed in, died Thursday after a long illness. He was 78.

During a 37-year career at Newsday, first as a reporter and later as an editor, Greene pushed his reporters to dig out public corruption by aggressively covering their assigned beats, no matter how seemingly insignificant. In 1975, Greene helped form an organization for like-minded professionals, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and a year later, after the murder of Don Bolles, one of the group's founding reporters, in Phoenix, Ariz., he headed a team that wrote a series of stories about corruption in that state. The project brought Greene national attention and an enduring legacy.

To many with whom he worked, Greene was an inspiring, larger-than-life character who saw journalism as a blunt instrument of the public good. To others, he was a demanding taskmaster who wore them out with his demands to know more.

As former Newsday editor Anthony Marro wrote in 2002, Greene held many jobs at Newsday, "but it was the investigative team that he created that remains his most important legacy, because he used it to help develop a culture in which public service journalism and investigative reporting became part of the newspaper's core mission."

Throughout his career, Greene exposed corruption at all levels, and many politicians fell as a result. He worked locally, winning his first Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal in 1970 for exposing land scandals in a Long Island town; nationally on such efforts as the Arizona Project, which exposed criminal activity and political wrongdoing in that state; and internationally, winning in 1974, along with a team of reporters, a second Gold Medal for a series that tracked heroin from Turkish poppy fields to Long Island neighborhoods.

Along the way, Greene made deep impressions on people he covered and helped send to prison. The newspaper's stories on former Suffolk County Republican Chairman Edwin "Buzz" Schwenk helped send him to jail in 1981 for financial irregularities. But in the end the two men were friends and fishing partners, all the more so because Greene wrote a letter to the sentencing judge asking for leniency.


Read more: http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-libob0411,0,5418917.story

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This is really sad. I took a journalism class with him at Hofstra in the late 90s. When I wrote on the student paper there he was a big influence and huge help to all the journalism students there who wanted to do things the correct way.

They don't make journalists like this anymore.

Godspeed, Mr. Greene. :(

[otherlander]

1. R.I.P.

:(

[emilyg]

2. RIP