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.
-
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."
-
Last June, José Rubén Zamora was sentenced to six years in prison in a money laundering case that concluded following a trial that press freedom groups decried as political persecution.
-
WLRN Public Television will preview the film to the public for free this month at events in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.
-
Equality Florida, the state’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, and its supporters say Florida legislators have introduced “an alarming slate” of more than 20 bills targeting LGBTQ Floridians, saying the legislation is “fueled by a sinister belief that transgender people are not real.”
-
WLRN is starting the new year with its participation in two public events this month to explore the local impact of climate change and water quality in South Florida.
-
The names of each of the homeless lives lost this year — 189 in Miami-Dade — were read aloud at a “Homeless Persons Memorial Day Service" in Miami. In Delray Beach, homeless advocated remembered 40 homeless people who died in Palm Beach County.
-
The three hostages — Elkana Bohbot, Yair Horn, and Eitan Horn — hold dual citizenship with their respective countries and Israel. Bohbot, 34, is Colombian-Israeli. Yair is 45 years old; Eitan is 37 years old. Both are Argentine-Israeli.
-
Advocates have been pushing the federal government for years on the work permit issue, but the administration is negotiating with Senate Republicans a compromise that would enforce stricter immigration policies to secure more money for Ukraine and Israel.
-
The South Florida Coalition for Palestine, joined by South Florida artists, led a rally at the Miami Beach Convention Center during Art Basel Miami Beach on Friday to demand a permanent ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. And an end to millions of dollars in Israeli bonds purchased by Miami-Dade County.
-
“This is an effort to rebuild hyper-local news in an underserved community," says Tony Winton, who founded the non-profit Miami Fourth Estate and is Editor-in-Chief of the Key Biscayne Independent. He announced his organization is launching news coverage of Liberty City with a full-time reporter, beginning next summer.
-
The Miami congresswoman, a vocal critic of President Joe Biden's policies toward Cuba, had received two donations totaling $750 last year from Manuel Rocha, the former U.S. ambassador in Latin America from Miami charged this week for being a covert agent for Cuba for decades.