Four reporters move to California staff

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California Editor David Lauter’s memo to the newsroom:

Between train crashes, birthdays and other distractions, I’ve gotten behind on staff announcements, so here, belatedly, is good news about several excellent additions to Metro, each of whom will strengthen our reporting in important areas.

Kimi Yoshino -- Kimi’s first story for The Times, back in 2000, was about a 4-year-old boy badly injured on a Disneyland ride. She had just started working in our Orange County office when she was thrown into the story and quickly demonstrated the qualities that have marked her reporting ever since -- dogged pursuit of facts, tenacity and clarity of writing. Over the next couple of years, she developed a thriving beat in which she repeatedly broke stories on the safety of theme parks, fights over development projects and the impact of tourism on the region’s economy. In 2006, Kimi moved to the downtown Business section, where she wrote about the excesses of wealth during the frothy final days of the housing bubble. She took on harder news assignments, as well, traveling to Iraq late in 2007 for a stint in our Baghdad bureau -- an assignment which proved even more memorable than expected. Kimi, who attended UC Davis, came to The Times after six years in the Central Valley, working for the Stockton Record and the Fresno Bee. In Metro, she will cover the health care beat, an assignment that’s central to our coverage of the region and its governments.

Alexandra Zavis -- Alex has been a mainstay of the Baghdad bureau since we hired her away from the AP in 2006. She spent a decade with the AP in Africa, covering conflicts in places that have become bywords for intractable fighting -- Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan. She also did turns in Afghanistan and Iraq, where she covered the initial U.S. invasion while traveling with a Marine unit. In our bureau, Alex dived quickly into Iraq’s chaos, covering the war during one of its most intense periods, through the execution of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. surge strategy and its aftermath. She accompanied U.S. troops into one of their largest operations of the war, the offensive against Sunni forces in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, and wrote vividly of the fighting in places like Baqubah, Muqdadiya and the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Alex grew up overseas and is a graduate of Oxford, so actually reporting here in the U.S. is a relatively new experience for her. So far, she says, she’s navigated the bureaucracy of the DMV and found herself an apartment, so she’s cleared the initial hurdles. Here in Metro, she’ll start out on a general assignment rotation.

Charles Piller -- Charlie came to The Times in 1998, after two years as a freelance columnist for the Business section and previous stints as a senior editor at Macworld and PC World magazines. He was a founding board member of the Center for Public Integrity, based in Washington, D.C., and is an expert on the Freedom of Information Act. For The Times, Charlie has written about technology, infectious diseases, the FBI’s computer woes and the failings of ballistic evidence. His reporting coups include pieces on terrorist incursions into cyberspace. His series on the Gates Foundation and its investments won the LA Press Club’s investigative reporting award. Among Charlie’s great skills is an ability to work his way through large databases, ferret out their secrets, then turn his hard-won knowledge into highly readable prose. That skill was on display in his recent stories on how some charities spend hugely disproportionate sums on their fundraising endeavors, and he will now put it -- and other skills -- to work as a member of the Metro projects team.

Kim Christensen -- One of Julie Marquis’ earliest memories of her work at The Times was being beaten -- soundly and repeatedly -- by Kim Christensen. That was back in 1996, when Kim was at the Orange County Register, working his way toward a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of what came to be known as the UCI fertility scandal. A few years later, Kim moved to the Oregonian in Portland, where he and three colleagues won the Pulitzer gold medal for Public Service for their stories on how the Immigration and Naturalization Service abused both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. Along the way, he’s written about Medicare scams, women’s prisons and police shootings. He’s also spent a brief stint at Kroll Associates, which in an earlier, simpler era would have been called a detective agency. Now, he’ll be working for the Metro projects team, where Julie can keep an eye on him.