Joy Press named L.A. Times Books and Culture Editor

Today the L.A. Times announced the appointment of Joy Press as Books and Culture Editor. The memo about the appointment, from L.A. Times Editor Davan Maharaj and Assistant Managing Editor for Features Alice Short, follows.

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.

As an editor she expanded our television coverage, with stories on topics including the rise of Web television, the profusion of female TV creators, the suicide of a “Real Housewives” husband and the afterlife of a reality TV star.

In addition to her editing duties, Joy has written about some of the talked-about shows on TV, including “Girls” and “Game of Thrones.” She has profiled Chloe Sevigny, Mindy Kaling and “Enlightened” creator Mike White, and recently reported on the art activities that preceded the London Olympics.

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.

She started her own writing life as a rock critic at Melody Maker and as a contributing editor at Spin Magazine. Joy is the coauthor, with her husband, Simon Reynolds, a British rock critic, of “The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and edited the anthology “War of the Words: 20 Years of Contemporary Writing in the VLS.”

Joy will report to Alice.