Veteran journalist O. Ricardo Pimentel has joined the staff of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service as the newsroom’s first managing editor.
Pimentel, who started Jan. 31, will help lead the award-winning nonprofit newsroom. With the addition of Pimentel, editor Ron Smith will shift his focus to growing and sustaining NNS, which has covered Milwaukee’s communities of color for almost 11 years.
Pimentel has served as the editorial page editor of the San Antonio Express-News and editorial page editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He has held a variety of editing and reporting positions for newspapers in California and Arizona. Pimentel has written two novels, House with Two Doors (1997) and Voices from the River (2001), both published by Bilingual Review Press.
He is the former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, a former board member of the California Chicano News Media Association; the California Society of Newspaper Editors; and the Associated Press Managing Editors association. He was the UNITY Conference for Journalists of Color programming co-chair in 2004. He also was on the faculty and directed the Minority Writers Workshop for the American Society of Newspaper Editors and has been a Pulitzer judge for journalism entries four times.
Since returning to Wisconsin in 2019, Pimentel served as the adviser to the MATC Times at Milwaukee Area Technical College, was a contributor to The Wisconsin Examiner and worked as a COVID contact tracer for the state of Wisconsin and as a correspondence representative for a mortgage servicing firm.
