Completing the David Lauter transaction from yesterday, the Times announced today that Steve Clow will move from Sports to be the deputy California editor. Memo covering both moves follows:

To: The Staff
From: Janet Clayton, Assistant Managing Editor
Marjorie Miller, Foreign Editor

David Lauter is moving to the Foreign desk Feb. 15 as deputy foreign editor and will be replaced on the Metro desk by Steve Clow as deputy California editor/daily.

David joined The Times in 1987 as a reporter in the Washington bureau, where he covered Congress, two presidential campaigns and the White House under presidents Bush and Clinton. He became national political editor in 1995 and supervised coverage of the 1996 Clinton-Dole campaign.

After another stint as a national reporter, David moved to Los Angeles in 1998 to be specialist editor, supervising the science, legal affairs, religion and education teams. In 2001, he became deputy metro editor, where he helped launch the California section and manage the department. He played a key role in shaping coverage of the recall of Gov. Gray Davis and the 2003 wildfires, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

David has worked with Foreign on several occasions. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he assisted the foreign staff in eastern Europe, covering the end of the communist governments in Czechoslovakia and Romania. Last year, he worked closely with us on the South Asia tsunami and the death of Pope John Paul II, as well as on Iraq.

Prior to The Times, David worked for the former House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, for a newsletter covering energy and environmental issues, and for the National Law Journal, covering the Supreme Court. He graduated from Yale in 1979 with a BA in history.

David and his wife, AnnJ Gumbinner, live in Los Angeles with their daughter, Miriam, 14.

Steve, who is currently a senior projects editor in Sports, is no stranger to Metro or to state and local news.

From 1998 to 2001, he was city editor in the San Fernando Valley edition, overseeing day-to-day coverage, including the Jewish Community Center shooting in 1999 and a project about poverty in the Northeast Valley. In 2003, Steve edited many pieces on one of the big stories of the year, the gubernatorial recall.

For the last two years, he's been the Sports projects editor, handling stories on the Kobe Bryant legal controversies. Steve has long been known as a versatile, go-to editor who knows how to think through stories, shape them and get them on to A1 and the section fronts.

In other Times' assignments, Steve worked in National, where he helped to edit the coverage of 9/11 and all that followed, including a stint on the foreign desk when the Iraq war began. Last year he was called back to National to help with Hurricane Katrina coverage, editing a huge reconstruction piece that was done under tough deadline pressure. He also worked as an assignment editor responsible for movie coverage in Calendar.

Prior to coming to The Times in 1993, Steve had been a copy desk editor at the Herald Examiner, and features and sports editor at the Daily News.

Born in Hollywood and raised in the Valley, Steve is a graduate of USC. He is married to Times staff writer Valerie Nelson and is the father of two high-school age children. He had a mercifully brief movie career: Look for him with a bunch of scribes in 1985's "Fever Pitch."

He begins his new Metro assignment after the Winter Olympics, in early March.