Carolina Garcia it is for Daily News

Garcia is the new executive editor of the Los Angeles Daily News. She was introduced in the newsroom this morning. Garcia, 53, comes to the Daily News after five years as executive editor of The Monterey County Herald, at 35,000 a much smaller circulation paper than the DN. Before that she was managing editor of the San Antonio Express-News from 1998 to 2003. "The energy and passion and commitment to the community is not going to change," Garcia said. "What I hope readers notice is more of that." Publisher Douglas Hanes said in the DN's web story: "She has been one of the top editors in the country and we were very fortunate to bring her here. This is a new era for us."

From a piece Garcia wrote a few years back:

I grew up in South Texas, the youngest of six children, raised by an uneducated single mother. I started school unable to speak English but finished by acing every test. I was part of the Chicano movement marching for civil rights. It took me 10 years of night classes in three states to get a bachelor's degree in mass communication. I landed my first journalism job because of the color of my skin and the sound of my name.

That was more than 20 years ago. In the years since, I've proven to myself that my entry into the business was no gift, nor was it part of a new lower standard for people of color because newspapers needed people like me to balance the color bars in their personnel books. We still need to hire and keep people like me, not to impress a census count, but to balance the pages of our newspapers.

Good journalism is about the right stories, photos, and graphics and presenting it so that readers get it quickly and easily. It's also about supporting, promoting, and pushing journalists, fresh or seasoned, encouraging them to give their best for themselves, for their newspaper, and for their community.

As editor now of a small newspaper in the Central coast of California, I find that I cannot hide behind the layers of a large newspaper. Where change once seemed difficult, it now seems possible.

Very possible. I have found it invigorating to make change, to take creative risks, and to hire a diverse staff to better reflect our values. In less than year, our newsroom's diversity more than doubled, increasing from 12 percent to more than 26 percent.

Changing the players in a newsroom doesn't necessarily translate into new content. The next challenge is to change, to grow, and to more wisely pursue new readers.

After the jump: the memo in Monterey.