LA Times adds three to staff

Hayley Smith, Gregory Yee and Ian James

The Los Angeles Times has hired three new reporters to the California coverage team as per the following excerpt announcement by deputy managing editor Shelby Grad:

Please join me in welcoming our new Metro staffers.
Hayley Smith has joined Metro’s L.A. Now desk, covering trending topics and breaking news.
She worked as an intern on The Times’ COVID-19 project “The Pandemic’s Toll: Lives Lost in California,” in partnership with the Pulitzer Center and USC, before joining L.A. Now. She has become a center of our breaking news coverage, in terms of live coverage and building quick enterprise off the news. Smith has been a major contributor to our coverage of the coronavirus and crime, as well as jumping in to help with transportation, science, demographics and much more. She is building a focus on fires and the ways climate change is altering our state.
Her writing has been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, HuffPost and other outlets. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Gregory Yee is Metro’s new night reporter. Yee grew up in the Los Angeles area and graduated from UC Irvine in 2012. He worked for a small paper in northwestern New Mexico for a year before joining the Long Beach Press-Telegram in 2013, where he covered crime for three years.
Ian James has joined The Times as a reporter focusing on water and climate change in California and the West. He previously worked for three years at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, where he was the lead environment reporter covering water, climate change and the environment.
Before joining the Republic in 2018, James worked for five years for the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, where he developed a specialty in environmental reporting.
James has won a Sigma Delta Chi Award in Public Service Journalism, a National Headliner Award in Environmental Writing, a Science in Society Journalism Award, the New America Award and the Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism. This year he was awarded the U.S. Water Prize for Outstanding Journalism for his reporting in Arizona.