LA News Group covers retiring editor

Via Jessica E. Davis on Twitter

Today is Carolina Garcia's last day at the Daily News and the Los Angeles News Group. She is the former editor of the Daily News and more recently has been called managing editor of enterprise and projects for the news group. She announced her plans to retire back in August; over the weekend the Daily News ran a story about her. Sample:

“Carolina is an inspirational writer and a strong-minded editor,” LANG Publisher Ron Hasse said. “She continuously elevated the talent and expectations of our journalists. Carolina leaves the Daily News and the entire LANG organization a better place than when she arrived.”

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She was 28 and living in Milwaukee working for social justice groups, mostly looking for coverage of events, marches and rallies and trying to get the press to cover them. She had also been going to night school for a decade and finally had enough units to get a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Wisconsin.

Garcia said she began to read the newspaper accounts of the events she had been pitching to reporters and felt frustrated that “they got the story all wrong.” She thought she’d try her hand at reporting instead and was offered an opportunity to write a column focused on Latino issues.

“I realized I didn’t know how to write,” she said. “It took a long time. So what I did was look at the newspaper very carefully and looked at the format, layout and structure ... and I mimicked that. It took a long time to build up confidence.”

She worked seven years as a reporter before joining the editing staff. It was there she tried to get reporters to see minorities in the community as not short-hand stereotypes but as people with lives and hopes and dreams.

The story says she is now 61. Garcia succeeded Ron Kaye as editor of the Daily News in 2008, coming from a newspaper up in Monterey.