- Staff writer
- Office phone: 757-446-2327
Flip past the front page. Past local news and sports. Keep going until you find stories about ghost hunters, old jazz musicians, men with mullets, Hugh Hefner’s bed and the eternal search for the perfect swimsuit. Reberta writes about such ephemera for the features departments, with a beat that covers lifestyles, trends, fashion and pop culture.
An almost-native Virginian, having moved to Hampton Roads at age 4, she went to Virginia Tech (before they had a good football team) and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a year in between to work at Newport News Shipyard. It was there that she discovered just why you should get that college degree.
After earning a journalism degree in 1981, Roberta put in a couple years at the Culpeper (Va.) News, a fine little mountain weekly, then committed further daily journalism at The News-Herald, in Panama City, Fla.
She returned to Hampton Roads in 1986 and began freelancing for The Virginian-Pilot. She was hired in 1989 or so, and covered nightclubs, civic leagues, schools, singles, entertainment and a little of everything else. I was briefly tempted by the dark side, enduring five years as an editor before regaining her freedom and returning to reporting in 1998.
Roberta has been married for many years to a guy named Earl (not the one who works here), and they have a son. In her free hours, she enjoys reading (novels, unless you have a problem with that?), hiking, camping, yoga, travel, home canning and singing along, badly, to ‘80s power ballads.
