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In another nod to the importance of what the paper does online, the Los Angeles Times is stationing veteran foreign correspondent Carol J. Williams on a desk in the newsroom to write for the paper's World Now blog. It sounds as if she will essentially be blogging about the day's international stories, and reporting them from her chair when necessary. In recent years Williams has been writing about California legal affairs.
Here's tonight's newsroom memo on the assignment from editor Davan Maharaj.
From: Maharaj, Davan
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2012 6:16 PM
To: yyeditall
Subject: Carol Williams Goes Digital....
To the staff:
Carol Williams, a Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent for nearly two decades, is returning to the foreign desk to enhance our online reporting of international news.
C.J. will weigh in on and help readers make sense of the most important foreign news of the day. She’ll do it by drawing on her deep experience, on conversations with Times foreign correspondents, and on her own fresh reporting (sources in many countries return her calls).The aim is a lively, smart, of-the-moment take on foreign news for World Now.
C.J. began her new gig a few weeks ago, and the precise form it will take isn’t chiseled in stone. It will evolve as she and her editors experiment with different approaches.
Some of what C.J. writes may make its way into the newspaper, but her primary mission is to make our digital foreign coverage even more valuable to readers.
It’s part of a broader effort -- about which you’ll be hearing more in the weeks ahead -- to harness even more of the world-class talent in our newsroom to make the online Los Angeles Times (already one of the most admired and most read news websites) even better.
The challenge is to combine the immediacy of the web with the depth and polish we strive for in the print newspaper. We owe nothing less to our many online readers – including thousands of new digital subscribers who pay to read us on the web.
C.J. will work closely with Emily Alpert, the driving force behind World Now for the last four months. A University of Chicago graduate, Emily came to The Times from the nonprofit news website Voice of San Diego, where she made a splash and won a passel of national awards for investigative reporting on education. She has brought great imagination and energy to World Now.
C.J., most recently the legal affairs reporter for the California staff, was a foreign correspondent for The Times for 18 years and for the Associated Press for seven years before that. She covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union, the Balkan wars, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, among many other stories. In 1994, she was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting from the former Yugoslavia.
She is a graduate of the University of Washington, where she majored in journalism, psychology and Russian.
Please join me in congratulating C.J. on her new assignment.
--Davan
