State Editor-California

Nita Lelyveld has been named state editor. She replaces John Hoeffel, who is moving to be an editor in the Washington Bureau.

In her new position, she will head a staff of statewide reporters based in California bureaus outside the Los Angeles region. These reporters cover breaking news and features all over the state.

Nita, an assistant city editor since last year, was previously a staff writer based downtown and in the San Fernando Valley. Before she joined the Times, she was the West Coast national correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1997-2001, spending much of her time traveling up and down the state. During her time as a correspondent based in Los Angeles, she wrote news and features: houses sliding off hillsides, the dot-com meltdown, medical marijuana, the Democratic Convention and San Francisco's crackdown on panhandlers in the Castro District. Her early reporting career included stints for the AP in Hartford and Washington, and she wrote a food column for the Tuscaloosa News in Alabama.

Nita is a 1987 history graduate of Harvard. She spent much of her childhood living abroad--South Africa, India, Hong Kong, England and Swaziland. She recently did the math and realized that, because of all of the traveling, she has now lived in California longer than she has lived anywhere else. She'll bring deep experience and a fine eye for great stories to her new assignment. Please congratulate Nita and John as they take on their new assignments.

--Janet Clayton, Assistant Managing Editor
Sept. 1, 2006