LA Times hires tech reporter, California economy reporter

Los Angeles Times executive editor Norm Pearlstine and senior deputy managing editor Kimi Yoshino sent out the following announcement on Thursday:

Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the below additions to our Entertainment and Business staffs.

Ashley Lee will be joining the Entertainment staff on Oct. 15 as an entertainment news reporter. Before she was hired a year ago for tronc’s now defunct entertainment vertical, Ashley was the associate web editor at the Hollywood Reporter. Based in New York, she edited and wrote breaking news coverage (she managed to get backstage for the famous Mike Pence goes to “Hamilton” moment) as well as features on film and theater, covered Sundance and Toronto and all the various awards shows. She has also conducted many on-camera interviews, created videos and hosted panels. In the past few months, she has freelanced for The Times, writing several terrific pieces, including one on Lauren Ambrose, the then-newly anointed Eliza Doolittle, and another on Jason Alexander as he made his directorial debut. Ashley is a California native, with a bachelor’s from UC San Diego and a master’s from NYU.

Margot Roosevelt, who started on Monday, will cover the California economy beat for Business, including such topics as trade, competitiveness, labor and working conditions, and automation. This is familiar territory for Margot, who had a similar beat at the Orange County Register the past six years. She has a deft writing touch, as seen on portraits of Little Saigon entrepreneurs and space tourists. She’s no stranger to The Times, having covered the environment and energy here in the mid- to late-oughts, writing about climate change and traveling on assignment from the Amazon to Alaska. Before that, Margot covered politics for Reuters, was a foreign and national correspondent for Time magazine, and covered Congress for the Washington Post. Margot has a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard.

Johana Bhuiyan will cover Silicon Valley and technology for Business, with a focus on accountability. Johana comes to us from Recode, where she covered transportation, including Uber, Lyft, Tesla and self-driving cars. She broke substantive news about Uber’s rape scandal in India, its Waymo crisis, and how its former chief executive Travis Kalanick tried to pay off the driver he was caught on camera berating. Prior to Recode, Johana also worked at Buzzfeed, covering transportation, and at Capital New York, where she was a media reporter. She graduated from Lehigh University, with a bachelor’s in journalism. Johana starts on Monday and will be relocating to the Bay Area from New York later this year.

Norm and Kimi