New reporting, editing assignments

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Several reporting and editing moves have been announced in the last week:

Stephanie Chavez will become an assistant national editor Feb. 8. Stephanie is a 24-year veteran of the Metro staff. Since then she has been at the center of many of Metro’s proudest and Pulitzer-winning moments. She was a founding member of the daily Valley Edition. As an education reporter, she won awards from statewide teacher and administrator groups. In 1987 she teamed up with another reporter for a groundbreaking story revealing that garages were being used as housing by more than 200,000 people throughout Southern California. She was a reporter during the 1992 riots and was honored for breaking news reporting for her stories on the Reginald Denny beating. She was a linchpin of the staff during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. As an editor, her many duties have included overseeing education coverage, shepherding Metro’s weekend report and offering graceful edits and guidance to columnist Sandy Banks.

Kate Linthicum will be moving to the Metro reporting ranks after a stint on the National staff. Kate came to The Times in the summer of 2008, working as an intern on the National desk. Kate’s eye for good stories and deft ear for phrasing has made her an excellent writer of telling features. We’ll now employ those skills on stories about the sprawling city in which we live, particularly the stretch that starts at Echo Park and heads west out toward the beach. Kate’s beat will include both features and news – she’ll be spending a significant number of evenings covering council meetings of some of the smaller cities west of downtown.
Gina McIntyre will become deputy film editor for the arts and entertainment group. For the last two years, Gina has efficiently guided our music coverage, resourcefully piecing together a network of writers inside and outside the newsroom to shore up our beat coverage. In her new role, she will report to Film Editor Tim Swanson, but she also will work closely with Elena Howe, The Envelope editor, to manage our expanding movie coverage online and in print. Gina joined The Times in late 2007 from the Hollywood Reporter, where her duties as managing editor/features included overseeing several special issues and industry reports. During her seven years at the Reporter, Gina also was part of the reporting team that covered major film festivals. Earlier in her career, in Chicago, she edited the Official X-Files Magazine and launched a short-lived horror movie magazine called Wicked.

Alex Pham has joined the arts and entertainment group to cover digital entertainment and the cultural impact of new media. A technology reporter for Business for the last 10 years, Alex will continue to track the video game industry for Company Town, and her beat will expand to include the convergence of technology and entertainment, examining digital media from corporate, cultural and creative perspectives. How will reading and the publishing industry change as a result of electronic readers? Will the movie studios let Apple change their business like its iPod changed music? How will entertainment evolve if the device of choice for watching it is not much bigger than a phone? Alex joined The Times 10 years ago from the Boston Globe, where she spent six years on the healthcare beat and one year as the paper’s Silicon Valley reporter. Prior to that, she worked at USA Today, the Washington Post and for her hometown paper, the Oregonian. At The Times, she has covered everything from the consolidation within the video game business to stories about the cultural impact of gaming.