Urbina was initially a reporter on "the Times" Metro desk. In 2005, Urbina moved to "the Times" national desk to become its Mid-Atlantic Bureau chief, where he covered West Virginia coal mining disasters, the Gulf oil spill, the Virginia Tech shootings and other breaking stories. He has also written extensively on criminal justice issues, including stories about the use of prisoners for pharmaceutical experiments, immigrant detainees working as unpaid workers, solitary confinement in immigration detention facilities, and the dependence of the U.S. Defense Department on prison labor. He became a senior investigative reporter for the National Desk in 2010, where he wrote a series in 2011, "Drilling Down", about the oil and gas industry and fracking.