Le Templar's goodbye column
The opinion pages editor is leaving the EVT to join the Goldwater Institute.
Loyal Tribune readers know of the newspaper’s challenges over the past year — the switch in January 2009 from a metro daily to a community paper with a smaller staff, company bankruptcy in September, the Nov. 2 announcement of a pending closure followed a couple of weeks later by a proposed sale that has yet to be completed.
Today, I have a great deal of hope for the Tribune’s future. But I won’t be there in the Mesa newsroom to see what happens next. I am taking advantage of a rare opportunity to join the staff of the Goldwater Institute, a public policy institution (what reporters used to call a political think tank) that shares the vision and values that the Tribune’s editorial pages have pursued with vigor for so long.
7:06 PM
PHXations, January 12, 2010
update: Another journalist move: Le Templar, the East Valley Tribune’s opinion page editor and political blogger, is moving to the Goldwater Institute, where he will be communications director. He’d been with the EVT 10 years.
Last week, the paper’s editor, Chris Coppola, anounced that he will be joining the Arizona Republic as an suburban editor.
The EVT was headed for closure at the end of the year until it was said that a company called Thirteenth Street Media, led by Randy Miller, had agreed to buy it. The end of the year came and went only with an announcement that negotiations were continuing.
Rene Gutel, the local radio reporter, is leaving town to join … the foreign service.
My family goes to Washington in February for 4-12 months of training, then to be deployed to an embassy somewhere in the world, exact locale TBD! I’m terribly excited. This is the dream job I’ve always wanted going way back to high school so I couldn’t be more thrilled.
Gutel dropped out of graduate school at Berkeley, where she was studying Andalusian poetry, to take up radio reporting. She’s been with KJZZ since 2004. She had her first child, a boy, a few months ago, too.
For Third Friday, the Heard has a series of events tonight. The first is “Changing Direction: A Conversation on Transitions and Influences in the Now.” It starts at 6 p.m. Cochran’s the PAM’s head contemporary curator; the panel includes artists Bob Haozus and Nora Naranjo Morse. There will be a performance by soprano Jennifer Stevens at 8 p.m. as well. It’s free.
7:00 AM