Moves on LAT national staff

Times staffers were informed late today that Denver bureau chief David Kelly is rotating in June to be a roving correspondent in Orange County and the Inland Empire. His Denver job was posted as an opening, but the city will be curiously well staffed in the meantime. In another of the special arrangements that Editor John Carroll and Managing Editor Dean Baquet seem keen on, Midwest reporter Stephanie Simon — who has been living in St. Louis for family reasons — will move to Denver. But she won't be part of the bureau. Instead, she will be a roving writer and "focus her energies on a new national beat, which we're still discussing and will be announced later," today's announcement from National Editor Scott Kraft says. Newsroom scuttlebutt says the backstory is that Simon was being wooed by the New York Times and this week turned down an offer to join the NYT's Atlanta bureau. In Denver, she won't even be the only LAT correspondent living there who doesn't mainly cover the region. J.R. Moehringer, who won a Pulitzer for feature writing in 2000, also hangs out in Colorado, according to the staff directory.