New assignments in Metro

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California Editor David Lauter announces new posts for three veteran Times staffers:

I’m happy to announce several important staff changes. Long-time Metro denizens Jean Merl and Ted Rohrlich are taking on new assignments, and Science team reporter Alan Zarembo is transferring to Metro.

Jean, who has unflappably edited large parts or our LA County and City government coverage for the past two years, will once again join the reporting staff. In the short-term -- between now and the end of November – she has volunteered to be the solution to one of our more pressing problems, staffing the Sunday night editing shift and the night reporter shift Mondays-Wednesdays. That’s a tremendous help that will end the need for a constant rotation of night-shift reporters, for which I’m very grateful. Later this fall, I’ll be looking for another volunteer to take on a few months of night-shift duty, and Jean will move to another reporting assignment.

In her 30 years at the Times, Jean has worked in regional bureaus in the South Bay and Westside, covered City Hall and the county government, written about K-12 education and served several stints as an editor, both in the Valley edition and on the downtown Metro desk. Her schools coverage won the John Swett award for education reporting, she took strong roles in our Pulitzer-winning coverage of the LA riots and the Northridge earthquake, and for years she has been a guide and mentor to many others on the staff.

Jean first came to the Times in 1978 after a stint at the Daily Breeze. She earned a BA from Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio and an MA from UCLA. She is a proven veteran whose great versatility and willingness to pinch hit when needed has helped our staff many times over the years. Please join me in congratulating her on this latest example.

Ted Rohrlich, among our most experienced and skilled reporters, will move to a new assignment designed to take advantage of his deep knowledge of the legal system as well as his ability to teach others. Ted will report to Matt Lait, and the core of his assignment will be to look systematically at our federal and local civil courts -- the largest civil court system in the nation -- to examine how effectively they function, how the system is changing and the forces which shape it. In addition, Ted will work with some of our younger reporters, sharing his extensive experience in investigative techniques, interviewing skills and methods for handling large-scale stories. And he will continue to be available for other projects as they arise, including an excellent one already in the works.

Ted brings unique qualifications to this multi-part assignment. He’s been a Metro staff writer since 1982, joining us after working at the Bergen Record and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He started out on Metro covering the criminal courts and the DA’s office, was a legal affairs writer and has spent many years as an investigative reporter. In the course of his career here, Ted has produced some of our most important stories. In 1990, he wrote a series that exposed the DA’s practice of using unreliable jailhouse informants to obtain questionable convictions -- work that won major awards, but, more importantly, brought an end to a scandalous practice in our criminal courts. In 1996, he was one of the lead reporters on a detailed investigation of homicide prosecutions in Los Angeles, which also won several major awards. Last fall, he took a leading role on the team that examined the October wildfires, producing ground-breaking work on why some houses survived and others burned.

I’m also happy to announce that Alan Zarembo, one of our most creative and original reporters, will be joining the Metro staff, assigned to the projects team. This is in part a return engagement for Alan, who worked in Metro when he first joined the Times, in 2003. In October 2004, he moved to the Science staff, where he has focused recently on global warming.

An indefatigable reporter with a wide-ranging curiosity, Alan has taken on such varied topics as ‘Cruz Bustamante: The Early Years,’ the Zimbardo prison experiment, the theft of human body parts and the impact of climate change on a small, Alaskan island. His stories about inequities in the national organ transplant system shared the Time’s investigative reporting award for 2006. Before coming to the Times, Alan spent eight years overseas, first as a freelancer in central Africa for the Economist and several U.S. newspapers, then as the Mexico City bureau chief for Newsweek. His article in Harper’s Magazine about the dilemmas of doing justice in post-genocide Rwanda won the Livingston Award for International Reporting.

Alan graduated from Dartmouth College in 1992 with a BA in political science and got his start in journalism at the Longview (Wash.) Daily News covering local government. He speaks fluent Spanish and indulges in a ridiculous, sometimes dangerous, amount of physical exercise.

Please join me in congratulating Jean, Ted and Alan on their new assignments.