Lisa Fung appointed Online Arts and Entertainment Editor

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Here’s the memo from Editor Russ Stanton:

Colleagues:

Lisa Fung, who has overseen our arts and culture coverage in Calendar for the last nine years, is our new online arts and entertainment editor, effective immediately.

She will oversee our formidable online entertainment report for latimes.com and theenvelope.com, which includes more than a dozen blogs and a team of producers, editors and freelancers. Lisa also will work closely with editors and reporters in Calendar, Company Town and The Envelope to keep these sites fresh 24/7. The goal is to extend our online readership locally, nationally and globally.

In addition, Lisa will be responsible for developing new properties and services that enhance our standing as the authoritative source for news, features, information and analysis about pop culture, celebrity, movies, music, television, social media, video games, arts, culture, awards and the business of Hollywood. She will report to Sallie Hofmeister, Assistant Managing Editor for arts and entertainment.

Earlier this year, Lisa won a Times editorial award for her passionate embrace of the Web. She has built the Culture Monster blog into a must read for arts lovers and one of latimes.com’s top 10 blog destinations. Reflecting our place in the world’s entertainment capital, Lisa gave the blog a pop culture and celebrity spin, with posts on everyone from Dudamel to Dylan to Danger Mouse. She is among the newsroom’s most active Twitterers, is an expert at dissecting Omniture trends to find ways to bolster traffic and, as a former tech editor in Business, is as comfortable with HTML and Facebook as she is with Wagner and Warhol.

As arts and culture editor, Lisa has run our coverage of theater, art, architecture, classical music, opera and dance. Her staff broke stories on the financial difficulties of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s retirement at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the appointment of Gustavo Dudamel as Salonen’s successor and the controversy over Gustav Klimt paintings looted by the Nazis. She has encouraged the critics in her department to write expansively, which, among other things, has resulted in three Pulitzer Prize finalists.

Lisa joined The Times in 1988 from the Des Moines Register, where she worked on the metro, national and foreign desks and in features. At The Times, she helped launch the national edition and worked in Metro and in Business before joining Calendar in 2000.

Russ Stanton
Editor