The following excerpt was sent out on behalf of the Los Angeles Times’ deputy metro editor Stephanie Chavez and assistant managing editor for audience Samantha Melbourneweaver:
We are pleased to announce that Jenny Gold and Kate Sequeira have joined the Los Angeles Times to anchor our new early childhood education initiative, which will explore the critical issues affecting California’s youngest residents, their parents, care providers and educators.
Jenny Gold
Gold, who will be a member of Metro’s education team, has spent nearly 14 years covering healthcare as a senior correspondent at Kaiser Health News.
During her time at KHN, Gold investigated rising hospital costs, healthcare fraud and violations of patient mental health protections.
Gold won the Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ 2021 Best in Business Award in audio for a documentary on the public radio program “Reveal,” about a first-year medical resident training at a hospital in Fresno during the pandemic. Her coverage of COVID-19 also won a 2020 award from the California News Publishers Assn. In 2018, Gold’s stories on sickle cell disease won a Salute to Excellence from the National Assn. of Black Journalists.
Her stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, on NPR and the “Marketplace” radio program, among others. A Berkeley native, Gold is a graduate of Brown University and was previously a Kroc fellow at NPR.
Kate Sequeira
Sequeira is the audience engagement journalist for the education initiative. She previously covered the Los Angeles Unified School District and breaking news for EdSource, where she reported on K-12 enrollment declines, staffing shortages and the pandemic’s impact on learning.
Earlier at Inewsource, she conceived engagement strategies for large investigations, including two in partnership with NPR and USA Today. Sequeira won first place for environment reporting from the San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2022 for her work on a story she co-wrote about heat deaths in Imperial County.
Sequeira’s new role marks her return to The Times, where she handled design, distribution and outreach for the annual Reading by 9 guide and was instrumental in taking the project online in 2018. She also helped run the High School Insider internship in the summers, first as a Times Public Affairs intern and later as a production specialist with the team. Sequeira grew up in San Diego and graduated from USC.