Nita Lelyveld named morning assignment editor as Megan Garvey takes on new role

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The announcement from Hiring and Development Editor Susan Denley:

Nita Lelyveld has been named morning assignment editor in Metro, replacing Megan Garvey who is moving into a new role working with health and county government reporters as well as on an effort to further integrate the California report with latimes.com.

Details follow, from California Editor David Lauter’s note to the California staff:

Megan Garvey -- Over the past 11 months, Megan has remade our morning assignment operation. Working with Shelby, Carlos and Amanda, she has turned the morning desk into a model for how the newsroom can break news on the web and simultaneously launch stories for the printed paper. Because of that work, we’re quicker off the mark on major stories, more comprehensive in our local news report and generating much greater traffic on the web. In addition, Megan has been a pioneer in developing database projects for the local news staff, including both the War Dead project and the database of Metrolink crash victims. As an editor she has demonstrated many of the same qualities she showed as a reporter -- sterling news judgment, tremendous energy and creativity. At this point, we’ve accomplished most of the initial goals that Megan, Shelby and I set for reshaping the morning desk, so the time has come for a new assignment. Megan’s new role will have two major elements: One aspect will be a team of reporters that she’ll work with, including the health care and county government beats. The other will be an effort to further integrate our Local and California reports with the website, taking greater advantage of the interactive capability we now have. In that latter role, Megan will work closely with Doug Smith and the database group at the website, looking for new, creative ways to give our readers usable access to the mountains of data we have or can get. Finally, because this assignment will allow her to sleep a little later in the morning, it will also make Megan available for line editing on major breaking news stories. Megan joined The Times in 1998, working first in Orange County, then in Washington before moving to the downtown Metro staff.

Nita Lelyveld -- I’m delighted to be able to say that we have the ideal person available to be our next morning assignment editor. Nita combines great news judgment with calm certainty and an incisive sense of how to shape stories. For the past two years, Nita has been the state editor, responsible for our bureaus in San Francisco and San Diego and the roving reporters based in Sacramento, Ventura and Riverside counties. In that job, she has emphasized both breaking news and narrative story telling, working with an extremely talented staff to produce memorable work. I’ll just cite a few among many: Tony Perry’s Column One about a Marine nominated for the Medal of Honor for heroics in Iraq, David Kelly’s dissection of the slum conditions of Duroville, Eric Bailey’s and Steve Chawkins’ work on this summer’s Big Sur fire, John Glionna’s feature on the 107 year-old lightbulb in Livermore’s firehouse. Nita has also ably handled the morning job during several fill-in stints, as recently as the past couple of weeks. In those turns in the assigning chair, Nita has shown a great understanding of the breaking-news operation and an ability to juggle the many tasks of managing the daily operation. At the same time, we’ll rely heavily on her keen appreciation of narrative storytelling as she works to expand our ability to write great, short-term features. Nita joined The Times as a staff writer in 2001, coming from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she worked as a city staff reporter and West coast national correspondent. Before that, she worked for the AP in Hartford, Ct., and Washington and the Tuscaloosa News in Alabama. She became an editor in 2005.

Please join me in congratulating both Megan and Nita on work well done and on new, challenging assignments ahead.