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Joy Press, the pop culture and deputy television editor of the LA Times' calendar section, gets the newly created job of Books and Culture Editor. That's the recrafting we told you about in May of the former job of books editor. Press was a book critic for VLS as well as culture editor at the both the Village Voice and Salon. Here's what LAT editor Davan Maharaj and features editor Alice Short say in their memo.
We are delighted to announce that Joy Press, who has had a distinguished career as a writer and editor on a variety of cultural and entertainment topics, is our new Books and Culture Editor. Her presence will allow us to expand our coverage of publishing and literary culture, with a special emphasis on ramping up our digital content.Joy has been Calendar’s pop culture and deputy television editor for 2 1/2 years. During her tenure, she developed a Sunday TV page and played a major role in growing our successful Show Tracker blog, which doubled its readership and has become a key site for television news and series recaps.
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Joy brings a wealth of experience to the job.
She worked at the Village Voice as arts and culture editor, overseeing all of the weekly's coverage in those areas. She had previous assignments there as television critic, book critic and editor of the Voice Literary Supplement (VLS). While at VLS, she oversaw the section's transformation into a stand-alone national supplement. She created the annual Writers on the Verge issue, spotlighting authors at the start of their literary lives, names such as Aimee Bender, Colson Whitehead, Steven Johnson, Alice Sebold and Aleksandar Hemon.
Before she came to The Times, Joy was culture editor at Salon, where she edited the book section along with culture and lifestyle coverage. She supervised a staff of 10 and developed a variety of blogs, reviews and features for the website.
The Times posted the entire memo at the Jacket Copy books blog. Carolyn Kellogg, the last staff writer in the Times' books pod, gives a thumbs up on Facebook: "This is so cool."
The previous books editor, Jon Thurber, announced in May he would leave the paper and is now an editor at The Wrap. David Ulin is still with the Times as book critic. Steve Wasserman is at Yale University Press.
Press tweets: "So I have a new job! Bye bye TV, hello (again) books." The photo is from Press' Twitter account.
