In the last couple of years, I think I've heard more glowing praise for Anat Rubin than for any young local reporter whose beat is Los Angeles. She was named a Los Angeles Press Club journalist of the year in June — as she was in 2006. Well, this rising star is out. She sent email to friends and contacts today disclosing that she will leave the Los Angeles Daily Journal at the end of the month to become director of public policy for LAMP Community. They work with the homeless, a subject on which Rubin wrote some of her strongest stories. Daily Journal Editor Martin Berg sent out this note to the newsroom just now:

As many of you know, Anat Rubin is leaving us in a couple of weeks for a new job at LAMP Community, an organization that provides housing and services for mentally disabled homeless people in downtown Los Angeles. If you've been reading Anat's award-winning coverage over the past nearly three years, you know that this is a subject about which she is passionate. She also knows more about it than anybody else in town. At LAMP, she will serve as director of public policy.

Time and time again, Anat has dug into her beat and come back with tough, perceptive stories that shined a light for others to follow. We're going to miss her a lot around here. We wish her well in her new pursuits.

Marty

In January, LA Observed's Bill Boyarsky wrote of Rubin and the LAT's Jill Leovy: "With reporters like them good journalism will survive, overcoming obstacles as it always has done."