Amanda Covarrubias appointed to new morning-news post

California Editor David Lauter's announcement to staff:

As you all know, one of my major goals over the past several months has been to build up our morning news operation and strengthen our ability to beat all competitors on breaking news of important events. In the internet era, it is crucial that we be able to give our readers depth and quality in print while also providing them quick, up-to-the-moment reports online that are faster and better than what they can get anywhere else. (In connection with that, let me digress for a moment to congratulate Matt Lait, Jack Leonard and Ann Simmons who beat the AP by a full 15 minutes yesterday on news of the conviction of Juan Manuel Alvarez in the Metrolink train derailment case.)

Today, I'm happy to announce a new assignment designed to move us further toward the goal of being the one, indispensable source for local news and information across Southern California: Amanda Covarrubias will be moving to a newly created morning-news post on the city desk. This job will be a hybrid of reporting and editing, and Amanda brings an ideal background to it.

A journalist for 26 years, Amanda came to The Times from the AP, where she was correspondent in charge in San Diego and a reporter in the LA bureau. In 1997, her breaking news bulletin was the first to inform the world of the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult inside a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe. She joined The Times two years later and has worked as an assistant city editor in the Valley edition and as a reporter in Ventura County and the Valley, playing important roles in some of our biggest breaking-news stories, including the 2004 firestorms, the fatal avalanche at Mammoth Mountain in 2006 and, just recently, the fire at Universal Studios.

In her new job, she will be the primary editor in the mornings, handling breaking news stories for the web and will also join our morning reporting team to help report stories as news dictates. This will allow us to separate the already busy morning assignment job from the increasingly demanding web-editing responsibility and will greatly boost the overall speed and efficiency of our breaking-news operation.

In addition to her work for us and for the AP, Amanda has been a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, the Oakland Tribune and the Palm Springs Desert Sun. A fifth-generation Californian whose maternal grandparents were migrant farm workers, she grew up in Oxnard and graduated from San Diego State University. She lives in Thousand Oaks with her husband and teenage daughter. Please join me in congratulating Amanda on her new post.