Robert W. Hooker

Rob Hooker spent more than 40 years as a reporter and editor at the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times). As a reporter, he and a colleague wrote a series of stories in the 1970s that helped send three Pinellas County commissioners to jail. As an editor, he helped supervise two reporters whose work on the Pasco County sheriff’s office won a Pulitzer in 1985. He edited a series on drug smuggling and public corruption that was a Pulitzer finalist, an examination of guardianship that led to statewide reform, and an investigation of the University of Florida football program that helped topple the head coach. For a decade, he was also the newspaper’s principal recruiter. In 1984, he researched and wrote a history of the Times on its 100th anniversary, and on its 125th anniversary he co-edited a book about the paper and Tampa Bay. He grew up in Chapel Hill, N.C., and earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Davidson College, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and editor of the campus newspaper. He received a master’s in history from Vanderbilt, with a thesis on race relations and the Mississippi news media in the early 1960s. At USFSP, he is adviser to the student newspaper and serves on the university’s Honors Program Advisory Board.