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In this latest installment of the ongoing serial The Montorio Files, the Times' Daily Calendar editor Alice Short gets new responsibility for the Thursday Weekend section. This means that current Weekend editor Michalene Busico awaits a new mystery portfolio, with the newsroom betting still that she will get some super-title with duties involving the weekly Times feature sections (and that Lennie Laguire will get a comparably splashy title and responsibility for entertainment coverage). The latest staff missive from Deputy Managing Editor John Montorio is below, but first here's a recap of the moves in his area in the past month:
Hawthorne new LAT architecture critic
Arts overseer at Times
Times fills the literary beat
Rutten upped
Tying up LAT loose ends
Tom Curwen, outdoors editor
Second floor moves at Times
Sipchen coming indoors
To: The Staff
From: John Montorio, Deputy Managing Editor
I am pleased to announce that Calendar Editor Alice Short will take on significant new responsibilities by adding supervision of Weekend to her managerial portfolio.
This is a move that not only recognizes the ongoing importance of Alice's contribution to our department, but also makes organizational and creative sense. As our most diverse and frequently published section, daily Calendar is at the heart of our report and there are obvious advantages to having one editor oversee its activities Monday through Saturday. Those benefits are amplified, when the editor is Alice Short. She brings to her new assignment superb organizational skills, a terrific range of experience across the spectrum of features journalism and a record of achievement. Anyone who had the pleasure of working with her when she edited the View section or --more recently -- the Magazine, knows Alice is a deft editor with a flair for collaboration and a keenly competitive news sense.
We've seen all those qualities at work since she took over daily Calendar. Now, she'll employ them to guide Weekend on its new course as a kind of weekly city magazine with an even smarter, more extensive service component. She'll be building on the good work of the Weekend staff and Michalene Busico, who will be moving on to another assignment soon. At the same time, the section will become a more prominent site for entertainment coverage. The idea is to bring some of Weekend's youthful edginess to the daily report and some of Calendar's sophistication and strong focus on the news to Weekend.
Alice will continue to report directly to me.
Please join me in congratulating her on this new assignment, which takes effect in November.