S Mitra Kalita, a 38-year-old Indian American journalist, has been named managing editor for editorial strategy at the Los Angeles Times.
Till recently she was the executive editor-at-large for Quartz, where she served as the site's founding ideas editor before taking the senior role.
Kalita previously was with the Wall Street Journal as a senior writer. She launched Mint, a business paper in New Delhi and has also worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press.
Kalita has authored three books related to migration and globalisation, including the highly acclaimed "Suburban Sahibs." In her new role, Kalita will help LA Times "remake how the newsroom works" and focus on "creating new forms of journalism," the WWD.com citing an internal memo said.
Kalita, who is also an adjunct faculty member at Poynter, will be working with a team of three other managing editors. The other three managing editors will include Marc Duvoisin, who will be responsible for news and enterprise coverage, Larry Ingrassia, who was promoted from associate editor to oversee new ventures and developing editorial products, and Megan Garvey, who will run the digital news report.
Kalita, whose parents are Assamese was born in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey. " I'm really honoured to be joining the LA Times at this critical time in its history and that of our industry," Kalita told HuffPost India.
In her new role as the LA Times managing editor, Kalita noted that some of challenges that she is looking forward to is how to deliver editorially excellent and commercially viable content for a diverse, newsy market like Los Angeles.
She has taught journalism at St. John's, UMass-Amherst, and Columbia J-School, and previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association.
Kalita is married and has two daughters.
Read her full bio here.
