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Jeffrey Fleishman, the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Cairo, is coming home to a new beat covering Hollywood. This word comes via the Times' PR department's Twitter feed. Fleishman was a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 2002 and has been a Pulitzer finalist. He is the author of "Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad" and "Shadow Man."
.@JeffreyLAT has a new beat: he's moving from the Land of the Pharaohs to the Town of Tinsel. Welcome Jeff to Hollywood!
— LA Times Comms Dept (@LATimesFreshInk) October 23, 2013
* 12:30 update: Here's the memo from editor Davan Maharaj and managing editor Marc Duvoisin.
To the staff:
As a foreign correspondent, Jeff Fleishman has proved himself a master of the character study. With a jeweler’s eye for detail and a storyteller’s voice, he has brought to life a kaleidoscope of colorful personalities, from Saudi cineastes to Egyptian revolutionaries.Now he’s taking on a new territory with no shortage of characters: Hollywood.
After 11 years abroad for The Times, the last six in Cairo, Jeff joins Calendar’s Arts & Entertainment team as a senior reporter. He will write across a broad range of topics in film, TV and the arts.
Before joining The Times in 2002, Jeff was Rome bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He covered the Kosovo war and the black market in nuclear materials smuggled out of the former Soviet Union. In 1997, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for what the judges described as “his versatile storytelling, notably including an account of the flight of 15 Buddhist monks from Tibet through the Himalayas.”
His first job at The Times was Berlin bureau chief. In addition to covering central Europe, he reported on the Iraq war and the rise of Al Qaeda. Jeff moved to Cairo in 2007, documenting the poverty, corruption and police abuse that would ignite the Arab Spring uprisings.
A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Jeff has published two novels (“Shadow Man” and “Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad”) and recently completed a third, “The Last Newspaperman.”
Please join us in welcoming Jeff to Hollywood.
Davan & Marc
