Ashley Dunn named Times California editor

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Times Editor Russ Stanton made the following staff announcement today:

After a 17-year journey through Business, Science and National, Deputy National Editor Ashley Dunn is returning to Metro this week – as California editor.

Ashley is succeeding David Lauter in this position, which is accompanied by the masthead-level title of assistant managing editor, and will now supervise our newsroom’s largest group of reporters and editors.

In his distinguished career as a reporter and editor, Ashley has helped oversee our coverage of the dot-com boom and bust, the space shuttle Columbia explosion, the election of Barack Obama and, more recently, the gulf oil spill.

As deputy national editor for the last three years, Ashley has worked with our spirited group of correspondents and with reporters and editors in our Washington bureau. Ashley joined The Times in 1986 as a suburban reporter in the San Gabriel Valley and then moved to Metro in time to participate in the coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Los Angeles riots and the Reginald Denny case. Ashley later joined the New York Times as a metro reporter and was part of the crew that launched that newspaper’s website, writing the technology column “Mind and Machine.”

He returned to our newsroom in 1998 as a technology reporter in Business and later became the deputy editor of Tech Times, a weekly section on personal technology. From there, Ashley headed up our Science team, where he brought together his skills as a wordsmith, team leader and process whiz, guiding his group in breaking news on the Web and mastering the art of publishing across more than one platform.

Ashley previously worked at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, the Danbury News-Times in Connecticut and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He has a bachelor’s degree in English from UC Berkeley.