LA Times gets new top editor

The Los Angeles Times has named Russ Stanton, the paper's current innovation editor, its new top editor. He replaces Jim O'Shea, who was forced out for resisting another in a series of staff cuts. Shea left in January after just 14 months on the job.

Mr. Stanton, who has been running The Times’s Web site, will take charge of an deeply unsettled newsroom that in less than three years has lost three chief editors, all of whom publicly protested the shrinking of the news staff.

Many editors and reporters resented the treatment of Mr. O’Shea — not to mention his predecessors — and for years the newsroom has been at odds with the paper’s publisher, David D. Hiller, and its corporate owner, the Tribune Company.

Mr. Hiller also named Jack D. Klunder, who has been in charge of the newspaper’s circulation department, to the new post of president of the newspaper, overseeing all the business operations. And he announced that David P. Murphy, who has headed the newspaper’s lagging advertising sales department, would be leaving.

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