Robert Cox Biography

Robert Cox is a successful entrepreneur and online publisher with an extensive business career working in finance and technology.

In New Rochelle, residents know him as the person who built Talk of the Sound from scratch, a web site that is today the most widely-read and influential news publication in New Rochelle with over 10 million readers since 2008 — 1.6 mm in 2021z

In the world beyond New Rochelle, Cox is known as a thought-leader in the field of citizen media and participatory journalism.

In 2004, Cox founded the Media Bloggers Association, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of blogging or citizen journalism as a distinct form of media; and helping to extend the power of the press, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails, to every citizen.

As President of the organization, Cox has been quoted in the media hundreds of times on a wide range of topics including, blogger ethics on which he is often cited as an authority having worked to develop one of the earliest Blogger Ethics policies in the United States.

Cox has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Citizens Media Law Center at Harvard Law School, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Freedom Forum, the First Amendment Center and many other organizations and law firms to provide legal services and other resources to defend citizen journalists in hundreds of First Amendment cases across the United States.

Cox worked with Axis/MediaPro Insurance to develop the first liability insurance product for citizen journalists.

Cox conceived and developed an online training program in media law for bloggers and other online journalists. He partnered with Harvard Law School to create an online course in media law for online publishers and bloggers at NewsU.org, a venture jointly funded by the Knight Foundation (i.e. Knight-Ridder) and the Poynter Institute (owners of the St. Petersburg Times).

Cox was part of a team of leading online journalists gathered by Poynter to discuss ethical issues surrounding online news media and create a set of guidelines for doing ethical journalism on the Web.

Cox was a regular contributor to The Washington Examiner Op-Ed page.

During the 2007-2008 Presidential Election cycle, Cox organized and ran The Ruckus, a bi-partisan political blog, for Newsweek. Cox managed the Associated Press blog feed from the “Scooter” Libby Trial, one of the most high profile political trials of the past decade. Cox has hosted his own radio show on WVOX 1460 AM and Blog Talk Radio and is a regular guest on WFAS 1230 AM.

Cox has written for Newsweek, BusinessWeek, USAToday, Congressional Quarterly, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Washington Examiner, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, MSNBC, PBS, The New York Daily News, The Associated Press and others.

Cox has made countless public appearance over the years.

Cox has appeared on numerous radio and television programs including on the BBC, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, BBC, NPR, and CBS Radio and has been featured in stories in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Online Journalism Review, PBS.org and many other news publications.

Cox has been featured in stories in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, the BBC, ABC News, Washington Post, Online Journalism Review, PBS.org and many other news publications.

Cox has been a guest speaker at many major media and technology industry conferences and served as a guest lecturer at colleges and universities across the country.

Cox has spoken at every major press association conference in the United States including the Society for Professional Journalists, the Radio & Television News Directors Association, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Newspaper Association of America as well as events for groups ranging from the U.S. Conference on the Judiciary, the First Amendment Center, the Newseum, the Conference of Court Public Information Officers, the National Press Club, the Kennedy School at Harvard University, the First Amendment Center, the U.S. National Archives, and more.

He has spoken at events for educational institutions including Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, the National Judicial College at the University of Nevada-Reno and the journalism programs at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Penn State, UNC-Chapel Hill, Northwestern/Medill, USC/Annenberg, Nevada-Reno/Reynolds and many others including Middle Tennessee State University where he was introduced by former Vice President Al Gore.

Cox managed blogger credentialing for two Presidential debates in 2008 — the All-American Presidential Forums on PBS hosted by Howard University (Democrats) and Morgan State University (Republicans) with candidates including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and others — as well as the American Society for Newspaper Editors candidate appearances by Obama, Clinton and John McCain and various corporate events including the Gannett Corporation shareholders meetings.

Cox worked with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Steven Breyer on the Conference for a Fair and Independent Judiciary.

Cox worked with White House Spokesperson Tony Snow on White House Social Media initiatives.

Cox worked with John Siegenthaler, founding editor of USA TODAY, on his series of Justice & Journalism conferences in partnership with the Judicial Conference of the United States, an organization of federal judges led by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Honored for his work on opening up the Federal Courts to citizens journalists, Cox was featured among the inaugural exhibits at the Newseum in Washington, DC. when it opened in 2008. Cox was the first blogger formally credentialed as media for a federal trial (U.S. v. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby).

Cox helped settle a high profile lawsuit brought by the Associated Press against a blogger whose site aggregated news headlines from the AP. Confusion over the role played by Cox and his organization led to significant controversy.

In 2006, Cox was nominated for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for his article What America Should Share with the World: Justice Holmes’ Dissent in Abrams v. United States and the Marketplace of Ideas published by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as part of a series where ten Americans were asked to select a document that best shared an essential American value with the rest of the world in the aftermath of 9-11 and the Global War on Terror. The award is given to eligible entries from communications media that have been “exemplary in helping to foster the American public’s understanding of the law and the legal system.”

In 2004, Cox took on the New York Times and won after he published a satirical New York Times’ “Columnist Correction Policy” for Op-Ed columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman. The Times took legal action and shut down Cox’s site; Cox fought back and won. The site went back online and The Times formally announced a policy change as a result. This seminal case has been the subject of numerous newspaper and magazines and several books on new media (Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control and We The Media)

Cox received international recognition for his work organizing the MBA’s Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative, a pre-YouTube video aggregation site through which the MBA served up millions of video streams of footage of the Christmas 2004 Tsunami shot by bloggers around the world in partnership with major web content providers such as Mirror Image and The Washington Post/Newsweek.

Cox received further international recognition for his work with reporters and broadcasters in Nepal after King Gyanendra’s direct assumption of power and censorship of media. Working for restoration of democracy, RFN was a site that carried firsthand information about Nepal to the world. Its contributors posted anonymously as there was a serious threat from the authorities for doing so. Cox created Radio Free Nepal as an outlet for reports, photographs and video smuggled out of Nepal to be published to a global audience. The site was nominated for numerous awards including RSF’s Freedom Blog Award.

Cox worked with a variety of organizations in a similar capacity in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and China and organized the first “Anoniblogging Conference” at Vanderbilt University to develop ways to disseminate news and information out and inside of countries controlled by repressive regimes. The site was featured in Reporters Sans Frontiers’ Handbook For Bloggers And Cyber-Dissidents

Cox organized BlogNashville in Tennessee which was, at the time in 2005, the largest gathering of bloggers ever held.

Cox first began blogging in 2002 while working as a marketing and business development professional for various start-up technology companies.

Prior to attending business school at the University of Chicago, Cox worked on Wall Street as a bond trader for two European banks and a foreign exchange trader for Citibank.

After business school, Cox provided strategy-consulting services to leading companies in North America, Europe and Asia as an independent consultant and while working for the firm of Booz-Allen & Hamilton. Clients included Reuters, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, the Thai Ministry of Finance, Bank of Montreal, Fannie Mae and many others.

Cox left strategy consulting to launch MobileWord, a venture-financed startup Internet business providing voice-to-text services to major U.S. corporations such as 3M and DuPont.

After 8 years on the national “blogging” stage, Cox turned his attention away from national issues and towards hyper-local concerns beginning in 2008 and full-time in 2010.

Cox launched Talk of the Sound in 2008 to provide the residents of New Rochelle, NY with the sort of media attention he felt the 7th largest city in New York State deserved. The site has become to “go to” source for news and information about New Rochelle and a source for every major media outlet in the New York area.

Cox’s tenacious reporting spurred numerous public integrity investigations, arrests, indictments and successful public interest lawsuits. His exposure of malfeasance of public employees working for the City government and local school district fundamentally altered government transparency in New Rochelle.

Cox has extensive civic and school board experience in New Rochelle where he has been a relentless champion for greater transparency. Cox has often been the catalyst for positive change in the school system, working with school officials, board members and community leaders to raise awareness and solve problems to create a culture of accountability within our public schools, focused on serving the needs of students and their families.

Cox has been a thorn in the side of hidebound local officials accustomed to operating in the darker corners of City Hall while working with more enlightened public officials to create reform-minded initiates like the school district’s Citizen’s Advisory Committee on budget and finance. Cox worked behind the scene to develop many of the recommendations contained in the CAC’s final reports.

Cox worked to foster what became a year-long celebration of the 50th Anniversary in New Rochelle schools. He edited and published an 8-part series on the history of the Lincoln School desegregation case, met with the local leadership of the association of black churches, N.A.A.C.P. and other leaders in the African-American community and lobbied school board members.

Cox has been involved in youth sports for many years. He devoted significant time for years as the Commissioner of the AYSO Soccer Program which he greatly expanded by creating accommodative youth sports programming for children with specific needs (e.g. developmentally disabled, religiously observant, ELL).

Cox has donated his time and resources to develop and manage numerous community web sites and social media platforms including the NAACP New Rochelle Branch, the Chamber of Commerce of New Rochelle, Habitat for Humanity for Westchester, and many more. He has been an instructor at the New Rochelle Public Library teaching a course on social media and web-based publishing.

He received his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business (Booth) and his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame.

Cox was born in Washington, DC and raised in Northern Virginia and Irvington, NY. He currently resides in New Rochelle, NY with his wife, a professor at Columbia University. They have four grown children and one English Bull Terrier.