Daily News and LANG hire county reporter from Register

David Montero is leaving the Orange County Register to cover county government and general assignment for the LA Daily News and its parent Los Angeles News Group. Montero tweets here — nothing yet about the new job — his latest story for the Register was about the closure of the Colossus roller coaster at Magic Mountain. Here's today's newsroom note from LANG vice president and executive editor Michael Anastasi.

Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce the hiring of DAVID MONTERO as a reporter for the Daily News and the Los Angeles News Group.

David, who comes to us from the Orange County Register, will be covering L.A. County and also be doing a fair amount of general assignment work. David has wide-ranging expertise and a reputation for quickly earning the trust of sources. He specializes in distilling complex issues, significant breaking news, and cultural and community happenings into sophisticated, impactful and highly readable stories.

David is a Southern Californian native who lived here for 35 years before spending about a decade in the Intermountain West working at the Rocky Mountain News and The Salt Lake Tribune.

While at the Rocky, some of his more notable assignments included covering the 2008 presidential campaign and being a lead reporter for the Rocky during the 2008 DNC in Denver where Barack Obama became the first African-American presidential nominee. David sat with the Alabama delegation -- several of which had marched from Selma to Montgomery -- and watched Obama take the stage in Denver and wrote a story about what the moment meant to them. His later campaign coverage included one-on-one interviews with both John McCain and now President Obama.

The Rocky also sent David to New Orleans days after Hurricane Katrina to write about the rescue-and-recovery efforts in St. Bernard Parish and to India for several weeks to document the work of humanitarian groups helping those who weren't getting aid following the historic tsunami that struck the region.

For The Salt Lake Tribune, David covered immigration and politics at the height of Arizona's SB1070 law and, in 2012, he earned the first-place award from Best of the West for immigration and border coverage. He also traveled to Joplin to cover the aftermath of the F5 tornado and to Aurora where a mass shooter killed dozens during a movie screening.

For six years earlier in his career, David was a reporter at the Ventura County Star where highlights included covering Gray Davis’ recall campaign and reporting on refugees fleeing the combat zones of Kosovo during the Balkan Conflict.

A graduate of Cal State Fullerton, David also completed a fellowship with the Institute of Justice and Journalism at the the University of Oklahoma, where he did a project on the Latino vote in the swing states of Nevada and Colorado amid the 2012 presidential election.

David, who joined the Register in 2013, spent the first three years of his career as a reporter at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. There, he cheerfully recounts, he was teammates with Frank Pine on a really bad Bulletin softball team.

Please join me in welcoming David. His first day is Aug. 27.

--Mike

Image from Montero's Twitter feed