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Mary Kaye Schilling, the former executive editor of Entertainment Weekly, gets the helm of the LAT's Calendar Weekend section. She used to be the magazine's Los Angeles bureau chief. Looks like the Thursday weekend section gets a makeover next year, and unfortunately the CalendarLive distinction that makes entertainment news so difficult to find on the Times website sounds like it also will continue. Today's memo:
To: The Staff
From: John Montorio, Associate Editor
Lennie LaGuire, Senior Calendar Editor
We're delighted to announce a key addition to the ranks of our senior editors. Mary Kaye Schilling--former executive editor of Entertainment Weekly--will join us as editor of Calendar Weekend in February.
Her appointment comes after a long search, and we think her new colleagues soon will agree that she's the ideal person to lead next year's relaunch of Weekend, along with its companion website, calendarlive.com.
Mary Kaye will be coming to The Times from Australia, where she is currently a top editor at Who magazine for Time Warner. She's no stranger to Los Angeles, though. Before she took the executive editor's slot at EW, she spent 3 1/2 years as its L.A. bureau chief, overseeing a staff of 12. Back in New York, she assisted in every aspect of running the magazine and creating its content. As editor, she was known for developing innovative coverage, while finding time to write her own pieces, including a memorable cover story on Quentin Tarantino.
Mary Kaye, who graduated from City College of New York, is the former editor of Sassy magazine and also has edited and written for YM and US. Over the course of her career, she has established herself as an imaginative and visionary editor with a great knack for stories and people, as well as a keen understanding of entertainment and popular culture. A former colleague describes her as having a "terrific story sense and sensibility" and especially notes her skills "at working with writers--championing careers, challenging them."
For all these reasons, we know you'll want to join us in welcoming Mary Kaye back to Los Angeles. We're particularly pleased that she was willing give up the life Down Under because she shares our enthusiasm not only for Weekend and its vital role in our report, but also for the city of L.A.
Also announced today: Metro reporter Erika Hayasaki is joining the national staff as a correspondent in the New York bureau. Her memo follows:
From: Scott Kraft, National Editor
We're very pleased to announce that Erika Hayasaki, who covers the youth and education beat in Metro, will be joining the national staff as a New York correspondent. She will take up her new post in the next few weeks.
Erika came to The Times through METPRO, graduating in the class of 2001 and joining the Metro staff as an education reporter. Since then, her work has won a string of awards, including the 2004 Times Editorial Award for best writing, and she has already begun to emerge as one of the paper's most talented reporters and writers.
Erika is a graduate of the University of Illinois, where she earned a bachelor's degree in communications. Before joining the METPRO class, she did reporting internships with The (Champaign, Il.) News-Gazette, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the International Examiner, an Asian American biweekly news journal in Seattle.
Please join us in congratulating Erika.