 As part of an investigative piece in 1978, Lopes worked at a construction site on Rio's underground Metro to highlight difficult working conditions in the stifling heat.Lopes won a Brazilian journalism award called the Prêmio Abril de Jornalismo in both 1985 and 1986 for feature stories involving football in the sports magazine "Placar".Tim Lopes's journalism colleagues described him as an old-school type reporter who gleaned his stories from researching on the street as opposed to sitting in an air-conditioned office browsing the Internet for ideas.