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Vernon Loeb, wooed off the CIA beat at the Washington Post in 2004 to run the Times' investigative team in Metro, is returning to the Philadelphia Inquirer as Metro Editor. He was outspoken in his upset during the unraveling of the Dean Baquet era at the Times and led the effort to gather and send staff petitions to Tribune. Memo at Romenesko:
Vernon Loeb reported on everything from City Hall to Tiananmen Square for The Philadelphia Inquirer in a lustrous 15-year period that also took him to the battlefields of Harrisburg and the first Gulf War. He interrupted his Inquirer career to cover the Pentagon and the CIA for The Washington Post and to manage investigations for The Los Angeles Times, an interruption that allowed Vernon to teach them about Philadelphia-style smarts and ambition and to learn a few new moves himself.
Loeb was one of the editors who suggested the creation of the Spring Street Project to help the Times re-connect with readers.