Robert Urban

1957 - 2023

Robert Urban

September 6, 1957 - September 20, 2023

Jersey City, New Jersey - Rob Urban, an international business journalist who spent 28 years at Bloomberg News, playing a key role in its award-winning coverage of the 2008 global financial crisis and helping establish the organization's presence across Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s, died September 20. He was 66.

Rob was the devoted father of two, Sasha and Katya, a husband who wrote love poems to his wife Monica Serino, a world traveler at ease with jet lag and strange hotels, an amusing storyteller with decades-long friends living on six continents, and a music lover who still found time to complete five New York City marathons.

As a student at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Rob was the tireless editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, the Niner Times. He started his professional career in the late 1980s as a courts and cops reporter at the Charlotte Observer and became known for writing multiple stories a day.

"I still see him walking briskly toward the metro desk, flipping pages in his notebook and announcing he's got something great,' said Cheryl Carpenter, who edited Rob's articles at the Charlotte Observer and later became the newspaper's managing editor. "His energy could change a newsroom."

Robert Alan Urban was born September 6, 1957, in Cleveland, to Alexander Urban and Daisy Pearl Pugh Urban.

In 1987 he was hired by the Charlotte Observer, where he met his future wife, Laura Zelenko.

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he moved to Prague, drawn by the adventure of covering the birth of a post-communist economic revival across the region. In April 1993, he was hired by Bloomberg News, and together with Laura opened the fledgling news agency's original bureaus in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Rob and Laura married in 1994, and in 1999, Rob achieved his dream of becoming a father with the birth of his son, Sasha. The three lived in Moscow until 2001, when they moved back to the U.S. to care for Rob's ailing mother. She passed away just two months before the birth of his daughter, Katya.

After he and Laura separated in 2010, Rob found a new love in Monica. The two married on June 1, 2019. Rob was overjoyed to spend Christmas 2019 in Brazil with Katya, Sasha, and Monica's family.

He had a simple philosophy about being a dad. "When I'm in doubt about what to do as a parent, I try giving more love," Rob said. "It works. Love is the rain and the sun and the soil for a child. Or for anyone. And giving love attracts love."