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A post-election newsroom ritual at the L.A. Times is figuring out what the editors and reporters who staffed the campaign coverage will do next. Some land at their old jobs, some move on to something better and some scratch to find a home until the next campaign. One question got resolved today when Calendar snapped up Barbara Serrano, a former Nieman Fellow who is the deputy editor on the political desk. She'll become the TV editor. The memo follows:
Edited 3:40 p.m.
To: The Staff
From: Lennie LaGuire, Deputy Features Editor
I'm very pleased to announce that, as soon as the voting or the court challenges stop, Barbara Serrano will be named Calendar's assistant entertainment editor for television. At the moment, Barbara is helping to run the paper's coverage of the presidential race, and it's hard to imagine better preparation for overseeing the demanding, fast-paced television beat, with its sharp-elbowed media politics, unreal reality shows and colorful cast of industry players.
Though she joined The Times barely a year ago, Barbara already has distinguished herself as a skilled and imaginative deputy political editor on the national desk and we are eager to see her bring her drive and journalistic savvy to this new editing post. Barbara will oversee Calendar's television reporters in Los Angeles and New York, and will work closely with Maria Russo and our critics as well.
Previously, Barbara worked at the Seattle Times as a staff writer, political editor and deputy Metro editor, and at the Orange County Register and Stockton Record as a reporter. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and has a master's degree in international journalism from USC. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2001-2002. When she joins the Calendar staff late next month, Barbara will report to Deputy Entertainment Editor Betsy Sharkey.
Also at the Times: Pete Thomas had what some staffers thought was the paper's most fun reporting job. He covered fishing, hunting and other outdoors stuff for Sports and traveled all over the place. He moved to the new Outdoors section when it began a year ago, but from a reader's perspective it never looked like a good fit. The weekly section emphasizes literary explorations, and his stories are more about going fishing. So it appears that Thomas, the son of retired editor-in-chief William F. Thomas, has gone back to Sports.