Roberts is most known for presiding over The Inquirer's "Golden Age",[2] a time in which the newspaper was given increased freedom and resources, won 17 Pulitzer Prizes in 18 years,[3] displaced The Philadelphia Bulletin as the city's "paper of record", and was considered to be Knight Ridder's crown jewel as a profitable enterprise and an influential regional paper.
[7] Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History recognizing their book The Race Beat as the year's best published in the U.S.[8] In it, Roberts and Klibanoff chronicled the civil rights struggle in America and the role the press played in bringing it to the forefront.
The book's major contributions were an analysis of Gunnar Myrdal and Ralph Bunche's 1944 treatise, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which had explained the problem of racial inequality and its possible resolution, and a close examination of the contribution of the black press to the Civil Rights Movement.
[10] Roberts received the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award for Distinguished Contributions to Journalism in 1993.
[11] Roberts was awarded the Order of the Long Leaf Pine by the state of North Carolina on January 30, 2015.