Stephanie Chavez is named Metro’s newest deputy editor
The following announcement was sent on behalf of Deputy Managing Editor Shelby Grad.
Stephanie Chavez is Metro’s newest deputy editor, overseeing our expanding education coverage and joining the leadership team of the newsroom’s largest department.
In this new role, Chavez will continue to be the lead editor for our team of writers covering schools, community colleges and universities while also taking on major new responsibilities. The Times has established schools, parenting and youth culture as priority areas of coverage in 2021, as all corners of the education universe begin to recover from the pandemic and enter uncharted territory.
In collaboration with Mitchell Landsberg, Sonja Sharp and our newsletter team, Chavez helped launch “8 to 3,” a parenting and education newsletter, is collaborating on the relaunch of our Reading by 9 program and is beginning to develop a larger vertical and other strategies to serve students, parents, teachers and others in the world of education. She will work closely with different departments of the newsroom as well as alongside our business colleagues to create new products, including live events, form partnerships with outside entities, expand utility features and generate revenue for the company.
Chavez first set foot in the Metro newsroom as a college intern in 1981. After several years at the Boston Globe, she returned home to The Times, where she was a founding reporter of the Valley Edition, covering the swift demographic changes of the east San Fernando Valley. As a Metro reporter and assignment editor, Chavez was part of four Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for breaking news: the Los Angeles riots, the North Hollywood shooting, the Northridge earthquake and the 2004 wildfires. Her coverage of the beating of Reginald Denny at the onset of the 1992 unrest won the Sigma Delta Chi award for breaking news. Her Metro reporting tenure included a long stint as an education reporter, and her coverage of inequities in education and reform efforts received two first-place awards of excellence from education associations.
As an editor in Metro and later National, she helped to pioneer our shift to digital storytelling and rapid response to breaking news. After a detour to work as the director of communications at Mayfield Senior School in Pasadena, she again returned to The Times in 2019 as Metro’s assistant editor for education, with even deeper insights about schools as she pursues her passion for this critical area of newsroom coverage.
