New Assignments for Two LATers

The full memo is below: David Lauter: New Metro assignments: Greetings all, I'm happy to announce two new assignments to key reporting positions. Phil Willon will become a roving state reporter based in Riverside, primarily covering the Inland Empire counties. Riverside and San Bernardino have always provided fertile ground for stories. That's even more true now as the two inland counties have been among the regions hardest hit by the recession. Phil knows this territory well. To begin with, he lives in Riverside, so the new assignment will come as a welcome change from an arduous commute. He also spent several years as the editor of our one-time Inland Empire edition. That assignment came after turns in the San Fernando Valley and Orange County. Before that, Phil worked for the Capital newspaper in Annapolis, Md., and for the Tampa Tribune covering state government, then Washington. For the last two years, Phil has been our City Hall reporter, following the mayor through the election season and into his efforts to refocus his administration and grapple with the city's deep budget problems. Now, Phil will take the experience he has developed and use it to produce probing, insightful journalism about a region struggling to regain its footing after a deep economic collapse. Patrick McDonnell will move to City Hall, bringing reporting skills honed over many years and several continents to bear on one of our most important beats. To find the oldest Patrick McDonnell clip in our archive, you have to go back quite a ways - there are more than 2,600 of his bylines in the files. The first came from our San Diego edition, late in 1985, when Patrick was writing about trouble on the border, drugs in Tijuana and arrests of illegal immigrants. Some stories never go away. In the years since, Patrick became the immigration beat reporter for Metro. He went to Iraq in 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion, and spent two years there, becoming our Baghdad bureau chief. He moved to Buenos Aires and covered South America, then returned to Los Angeles and, for the past year, has covered labor issues. He is a veteran with a keen eye for telling detail and a gift for storytelling. Patrick moves onto his new beat at a time when city government faces deep crises. His skills as a veteran reporter will stand him in good stead as he seeks to tell the story of city government in peril.â€¬â€ªPlease join me in congratulating both of these excellent reporters on their newest assignments.

Fishbowl

New Assignments for Two LATers

Tina Dupuy

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Tina Dupuy