Rone Tempest is an award-winning journalist whose career spans four decades, including 26 years as a national and foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. As a foreign correspondent based in India, France, China and Hong Kong he covered stories in more than 40 countries on six continents. Major stories included the Falklands War, the Grenada invasion, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Bhopal (India) disaster, the Sri Lanka civil war, the fall of Ferdinand Marcos, the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu, the death of Deng Xiao Ping, the 1997 Hong Kong handover, and the fall of Suharto in Indonesia. He covered Afghanistan for two decades under Soviet (1986) Taliban (1997) and U.S. (2001) control.

As Senior California correspondent based in Sacramento in 2004, he shared in the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of the massive wildfires in Southern California. Other awards include the Harvard University Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting (1997), South Asia Journalists Association “Best Story 1998” and Overseas Press Club Citation For Excellence twice (1984 and 1997). From 2000-2007 he taught courses on foreign corresponding and investigative reporting  at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he was an I.F. Stone Fellow. 

After retiring from the LA Times in 2007 and moving to his home in Wyoming, he worked as a regional consultant for the national nonprofit news site ProPublica.org. In 2008 he was co-founder of the Wyoming nonprofit public policy news site WyoFile.com and served as editor from 2008-2011. In 2018 he was named to the board of directors of the nonprofit Utah Investigative Journalism Project.  

His stories have appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines including Rolling Stone, TV Guide, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Detroit Magazine and, most recently,  Sports Illustrated. He continues to contribute occasional stories to the Los Angeles Times, Salt Lake Tribune and WyoFile.com  He is the author a 2014 investigative journalism eBook: The Two Elk Saga: How One Man's Dream Became State, Federal Nightmare published by Atavist Press. The book and related series of articles in WyoFile.com resulted in the federal indictment, conviction and imprisonment of its main subject, developer Michael J. Ruffatto.

Descendant of Mormon pioneers who first came to Wyoming and Utah territories in 1860, Tempest feels most at home in the mountain west. From 1995 until 2018 he and his wife, writer and editor Laura Richardson, had a home in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains outside of Lander, Wyoming.       

Father of four grown children, he now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah where he and his wife have a cat named Rusty Staub and a harrier hound dog, Remy Martin.