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Maya Lau, a former New York Times Magazine news assistant and blog editor who has been reporting the last couple of years in Baton Rouge, has been hired by the Los Angeles Times and assigned to cover the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. She started last week. The note on her went out to the newsroom today.
Subject: Maya Lau -- L.A. County Sheriff's Department Reporter, MetroFrom: Shelby Grad, Assistant Managing Editor, and Jack Leonard, Law Enforcement Editor
I’m delighted to announce that Maya Lau has joined us to cover the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. She started last week after finishing a recent multistate road trip from Louisiana.
Maya comes from the (Baton Rouge, La.) Advocate, where she covered crime before becoming part of the newspaper’s investigative team.
She started her career writing freelance pieces from Senegal while serving in the Peace Corps. She worked as a news assistant at the New York Times before moving to the Shreveport Times in Louisiana, where she covered breaking crime news and criminal justice issues.
At the Advocate, Maya tackled some of the highest profile national stories of 2016, including the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling by police, the killing of three law enforcement officers just days later and the Louisiana floods that claimed more than a dozen lives.
She also earned a reputation for hard-hitting accountability journalism. Her work on the Angola Prison warden’s business side deals ended the career of one of the country’s most colorful and celebrated prison administrators. Subsequent stories on the state’s prison system led to the resignations of several other top prison officials. Her work won an IRE award this year.
Maya grew up in San Diego and holds a bachelor’s degree in international studies from Vassar College.
Please join me in congratulating her on her new assignment and make her feel welcome. She has taken Alice Walton’s old desk, near the Metro-Baja Metro border.
While in Senegal with the Peace Corps in 2011, Lau wrote a fashion blog called Sartorial Senegal and a handful of pieces for the Huffington Post. Among her roles at the NYT in 2012-13, she edited the magazine blog, The 6th Floor. She tweets at @mayalau.
First day! https://t.co/75eQYPwsjk
— Maya Lau (@mayalau) December 5, 2016
.@latimes photographer @GlennKoenig & I are out on a ridealong w the LA County Sheriffs Dept in Compton, where we responded to a shooting pic.twitter.com/586wdoXNgc
— Maya Lau (@mayalau) December 7, 2016
