Sergio R. Bustos
Vice President for NewsHe joined WLRN as VP for News in January 2023 to lead the NPR affiliate's award-winning news team.
Bustos was a reporter for two decades at newspapers large and small, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, before becoming an editor at the Miami Herald in 2005, and since has served as editor of POLITICO Florida and deputy opinion editor for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Most recently, Bustos was Enterprise/Politics Editor for the USA Today Network-Florida’s 18 newsrooms.
Bustos also worked as regional manager with the local-journalism nonprofit Report for America will jumpstart efforts to secure resources for WLRN News’ ambitious plans. He was South regional manager for RFA, a non-profit that seeks to fill “news deserts” caused by the nationwide crisis in journalism.
Born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in Annandale, Va., Bustos began his journalism career at The Washington Post — delivering the newspaper as a teenager in suburban northern Virginia.
After graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University, Bustos went to work as a reporter for newspapers in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley — the News-Virginian in Waynesboro and Daily News-Leader in Staunton — before becoming a general assignment reporter at the Wilmington, Del., News-Journal.
He later joined The Philadelphia Inquirer as a reporter after his News-Journal editor recruited him to the big-city newspaper.
At The Inquirer, he won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1992 for a series of stories that revealed how courts and police routinely violated rights of Spanish-speaking farmworkers in southeastern Pennsylvania.
He also was among the lead reporters who exposed a scandal involving thousands of fraudulent absentee ballots that prompted a federal judge to nullify the election of a Democratic state senator. The Inquirer was later named as a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for the stories.
He was one of 10 journalists nationwide to be awarded a John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation grant to study at the University of Southern California’s Center for International Journalists, where he traveled and wrote extensively about Mexico and Cuba in 1992-1993.
Bustos spent more than six years as a Washington correspondent for the former Gannett News Service. He covered the contentious national debate over immigration and border security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, for Gannett’s southwestern newspapers, including The Arizona Republic.
He joined the Miami Herald as a first-time editor in 2005. He ran the teams covering police and courts, as well as Broward County, and he served as state and politics editor. He also was Sunday editor. In 2012, he supervised an award-winning investigation into a local congressman’s involvement in a campaign finance scandal, and oversaw coverage of several governor races and presidential elections. He co-authored a book, Miami's Criminal Past Uncovered, chronicling the city’s most notorious crimes, with Herald reporter Luisa Yanez in 2007.
Bustos returned to reporting in 2015 when he joined The Associated Press as a national political correspondent to cover the 2016 presidential campaign, assigned to cover candidates Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
He was later named editor of POLITICO Florida, where he edited a series of stories that led to the resignation of one of Florida’s most powerful state senators amid sexual harassment allegations from six women who were on the lawmaker’s staff or had lobbied him. He oversaw coverage of the Florida Legislature.
Before joining WLRN, he was Enterprise/Politics Editor for the USA Today Network-Florida’s 18 newsrooms. He coordinated coverage of the 2022 governor and U.S. Senate elections and worked with other newsrooms to cover Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial migrant relocation program and the devastating impact of Hurricane Ian.
-
Equal Ground will launch a tour to promote its voter education and mobilization efforts on Saturday in Pinellas County with additional stops around the state.
-
The Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, citing analysis of the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, reports that some 326,000 migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua have arrived at airports in Florida over the past year
-
The famed civil rights attorney said the police-involved shooting last month of Donald Armstrong is yet another disturbing instance when police officers fail to handle mental health-related emergency calls and routinely impose criminal charges to justify using lethal force
-
With the Florida Supreme Court upholding the state’s new restrictive abortion ban, pregnant women in Florida, especially those in South Florida, may soon head to countries in Latin America, where several countries have legalized the procedure, a reproductive health expert told WLRN on Friday.
-
Under the bill, S.B. 7014, ethics boards won’t be able to initiate their own investigations. Members of the public would have to file complaints to start any inquiry and can only do so if they’ve personally witnessed an ethics violation.
-
A Miami-Dade doctor and central Florida woman testified before a committee of top Democratic members of Congress in Fort Lauderdale during a hearing about “the escalating threat to reproductive freedom.”
-
The hearing, to be held in Broward County, comes a day after Florida’s Supreme Court cleared the way for the state to ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
-
The vice president, who leads the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, unveiled the plans during a visit to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, site of one of nation's worst mass school shootings.
-
This weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris will be visiting Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to meet the families of victims of the 2018 mass shooting. Seventeen people, including 14 students, were killed.
-
The two Republican Florida senators penned a strongly-worded letter to President Biden demanding that he inform Floridians of the White House plans to address the unfolding humanitarian and security crisis in Haiti and prevent what they anticipate to be a “drastic influx of Haitians” to the state.
-
The 77-year-old singer and musician is performing live at the Afro Roots Fest 2024 in Miami Beach on March 16. He talked to WLRN's Michael Stock about his life and career — and played a new song.
-
Miami native Joanie Leeds's new record — “FREADOM” — takes on the movement by government leaders in Florida and other states to ban certain books. She spoke to Michael Stock, host of WLRN's “Folk & Acoustic Music."