Layoffs and leavings at the Daily News

The Los Angeles Daily News newsroom got a little smaller this week. Online content producer Cliff Redding and web producer/designer Tom Gapen received layoff notices. A third person, from circulation, also got a pink slip. The latter layoff was mentioned last week.

Additionally, the city editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, John Miller, is leaving the paper to teach high school English in Kuwait, according to a memo obtained by LA Observed.

(Corrections: Original post had Mr. Redding's and Mr. Gapen's titles wrong.)

Garcia takes the helm

My rumor mill turned out to be dead on. Carolina Garcia is the new executive editor at the Los Angeles Daily News, taking over from Ron Kaye who, er, resigned the position Friday.

Garcia spent the last five years at the Monterey County Herald, which has a circulation of 35,000. She takes over a paper with a circulation of about 150,000.

The Daily News brief includes this nugget: Under her leadership, The Herald won a general excellence award in 2006 in the Better Newspaper Contest sponsored by the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

From the rumor mill, *updated

Carolina Garcia, executive editor at the Monterey County Herald, is rumored to be a leading candidate to succeed Ron Kaye as editor of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Garcia, a Texas native, came to the Herald in 2003 after five years as managing editor at the San Antonio Express-News.

Here's a little more background from the hard-hitting Carmel Residents Association newsletter, dated April, 2003:

Carolina Garcia, one of the nation's most successful Latina journalists, is the Herald's new executive editor. For the past five years she has been managing editor of the San Antonio Express-News, where she pressed for more investigative reporting. Garcia was a grant writer for the Latin American Union for Civil Rights before joining the Milwaukee Journal as a columnist writing on Latino issues. She rose through the ranks to become assist- ant state editor and Sunday editor and, when the two Milwaukee papers merged to become the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1995, she was named assistant managing editor, a position she held until moving to San Antonio. As chairwoman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' diversity committee, Garcia led national efforts to encourage the hiring and promotion of minorities in the nation's newsrooms.

*The Daily News makes it official: Editor Ron Kaye "resigned" today. LA Observed has some of the memos floating about the newsroom and says a new editor will be introduced Monday morning (see above).