Bio

Dennis Romero is a staff writer and news blogger for LA Weekly. Last year he wrapped up a three-year stint as the sole staff writer at Ciudad magazine, an upscale glossy from the folks behind Los Angeles magazine and Texas Monthly. The city/regional publication was aimed at English-speaking Latinos in Los Angeles, and Romero served as its go-to reporter.

Romero was born and raised in San Diego. His father was the Mexico correspondent for the San Diego Tribune and later the Union-Tribune; he went on to become an editor at the Los Angeles Times before returning to San Diego, where he still contributes to the "U-T." His mother also occasionally pens restaurant reviews for the San Diego paper. Romero's first paid reporting jobs came as early as 1986, when he was in high school: He contributed to small, community newspapers such as the Uptown Examiner and the Chula Vista Star-News. In 1989 he started stringing for the Los Angeles Times' Westside section, covering Santa Monica and Beverly Hills city council meetings. A few years later he became the New York Times "campus correspondent" at UCLA, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science. In 1992, fresh off an internship at the Los Angeles Times, and while still in school, Romero became a frequent contributor to the paper's features and entertainment sections. On April 29, 1992, as the not-guilty verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial were announced, Romero happened to be in the Times' third-floor newsroom in downtown Los Angeles. As civil unrest erupted, he was dispatched to help cover some of the less-affected areas of town. For its coverage of the riots, the Times won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.

After graduating from UCLA in June, 1992, Romero took a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer as a features staff writer. In 1994, at the age of 24, Romero returned to the Times as a features and entertainment staff writer. A year later he become one of the first reporters at the paper to receive training in the use of then-revolutionary tools: the Internet and email. He wrote mainly about youth and pop culture, discovering the street racers who would inspire the Fast and the Furious franchise, penning early features about rave culture, and writing about "cyber-hippies," female computer hackers and some of surfing's iconic characters. In 1996 he was named as a finalist for the Lifestyle Journalism Awards for a piece he penned on surf-meets-the-streets fashion. In 1997 he was named to an elite committee of "senior journalists" at the Times. He worked at the paper until 1998, when he started freelancing for the New Times Los Angeles. At the weekly newspaper, owned by a company that evolved into Village Voice Media, he launched a dance music column called Groundswell.

In 2000 Romero took a job as managing editor of webcaster and dance music news site grooveradio.com. When the dot-com money ran out nearly a year later, he turned to hard news - covering the Los Angeles Police Department for City News Service, a regional wire service specializing in broadcast clients. In the meantime he freelanced for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly. In 2003 he was asked to join the launch of LA CityBeat, a new alternative weekly newspaper. As "senior writer," he joined former Los Angeles Times entertainment editor Dean Kuipers, and Times contributors Steve Appleford and Natalie Nichols, on the CityBeat team. At the paper he wrote pioneering cover stories about L.A.'s intractable skid row, Westside gangs that were becoming extinct as a result of gentrification, and a mayoral candidate who was wrongly being discounted as a threat to take the job - L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

In 2005, Emmis Publishing launched Ciudad magazine and asked Romero to be a staff writer. He joined a team that included editor-in-chief Oscar Garza, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and editorial director Angelo Figueroa, former editor of People en Espanol. In 2006 Romero received New America Media's highest honor, its Best In Depth award for a Ciudad feature about anti-immigrant Latinos. Romero stayed at Ciudad until the magazine folded in June, 2008.

Throughout his career Romero has mastered a range of print journalism, from deadline-a-minute wire-service work to newspaper features to columns to long-form magazine writing. Any editor he's worked with will say he's a stickler for accuracy, and the record supports it. He's taped video reports; and he's blogged since 2003. In recent years Romero has given guest lectures in feature writing at UCLA and USC. A specialist in electronic dance music since 1991, he's become a nationally recognized expert in the genre. The New York Times, Spin magazine and Orlando Weekly have quoted him on the topic. In recent years Romero has served on the Grammy Awards dance music screening committee. More than anything, he has an instinctual nose for news in any arena, and he has the organizational skills, logical mind and gumshoe ethic to carry out unique features and profiles, beginning to end.