Booth and O'Connor bound for Mexico

The Washington Post announced in the newsroom that Los Angeles correspondent William Booth is going back on the foreign beat. His wife, ex-foreign correspondent Anne-Marie O'Connor, will be leaving the L.A. Times, where she covers the arts for Calendar.

We're pleased to announce that William Booth will become our next correspondent in Mexico City, succeeding Manuel Roig-Franzia, who is returning to the newsroom.

As its peripatetic pop culture correspondent, Bill chronicled the bonfire of vanities for Style, spending time on the couch for revealing profiles of a dizzy Jennifer Aniston and an angry Arnold Schwarzenegger; filing you-are-there reports from the Oscars, Cannes, Sundance; and detailing the travails of jailbird Paris Hilton.

Bill joined the national staff as a science reporter, where he was a pioneer in translating research on global climate change into daily journalism. He served as bureau chief in Miami, writing about the lingering battles over civil rights in the South and a Florida transformed by immigration, crime and a category 5 hurricane. As bureau chief in Los Angeles, he covered the burning of the forests, the meltdown of the electrical grid and the cinematic rise of the Governator.

On loan to foreign, he did war-time reporting tours in Haiti, the Balkans and Iraq.

Born in New York City, Bill grew up in Houston and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. Bill began his career as a business correspondent in Tokyo, was a reporter at the Austin American-Statesman, a Vannevar Bush fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a staff writer at Science magazine.

After some intensive Spanish training, Bill will be making the move to Mexico this fall. He is married to Anne-Marie O'Connor, a veteran Latin America correspondent and currently a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, who is finishing a book for Knopf about a notorious Nazi art theft case.

O'Connor's book is about the Gustav Klimt paintings looted in Vienna by the Nazis that were returned to the ownership of a Los Angeles woman. O'Connor confirms she will regretfully leave the LAT to join Booth and, after finishing her book, resume daily journalism in January 2009 in Mexico City.