Jaffe and James Take New Positions in Times Sports Department Operation

Rick Jaffe, deputy managing editor for sports, photos and graphics at the Chicago Sun-Times, has been named executive sports editor of The Times. Jaffe will hold the No. 2 position in The Times sports department and will report to Times sports editor Bill Dwyre.

Mike James, current assistant sports editor, has been promoted to senior assistant sports editor and will share that title with Mike Kupper, previously the only Times staffer at that level. Kupper came to The Times from the Milwaukee Journal in 1984, James from the Hartford Courant in 1985.

Jaffe, who was a news and makeup editor in Times sports from 1982 through 1987, has been an assistant sports editor at the Orlando Sentinel, the Detroit News and the Atlanta Journal Constitution and was an assistant managing editor at the National Sports Daily before its demise in the early 1990s.

Jaffe was one of the main design editors for The Times during its 1984 Olympic coverage and was also one of the main architects of the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s coverage of the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.

James, a graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., was an assistant sports editor at both the Burlington, Vt., Free Press and the Courant before coming to The Times.