In N Out

KABC 790 general assignment reporter Jo Kwon has made a move to KFI. She’ll be the station’s newest reporter on the news team. Kwon had been with KABC since 2009 and won a Golden Mike for her work at the station.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

LA Observed just caught a couple of LA Times Washington bureau departures that we too seem to have missed in the past couple of weeks.

Late last month it was announced that Tom Hamburger would be joining the National desk at the Washington Post. Hamburger will cover the role of money in politics and “many other aspects of the campaign and power in Washington” according to a memo obtained by Huffington Post.

Meanwhile, Politico reported last week that Jim Oliphant had signed on to serve as deputy editor of the National Journal. Oliphant starts his new gig Monday.

This morning, employees at the Denver Post met their new incoming president and CEO. Per a dispatch on the 120-year-old daily’s website, former San Diego Union-Tribune publisher Ed Moss will assume those duties on February 20.

There’s some interesting background in the Post piece by Aldo Svaldi that involves the paper’s parent company, Digital First Media. Moss, who was also named executive vice-president of that parent, has been on Digital First chairman William Dean Singleton‘s radar since the mid-1990s:

Singleton said he first got to know Moss in 1996, and eventually hired him in 2007 to oversee the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. “I was distraught when he came to me and said he was going to San Diego,” Singleton said. As a potential bidder for that newspaper, Singleton watched its performance closely.

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Sophia Kercher has been named the new associate editor of Pasadena Magazine.

“I’ve been in love with Pasadena ever since seeing the city’s jacaranda trees,” Kercher tells us. “I’m looking forward to uncovering the many narratives under those trees.”

She arrives at Pasadena after two and a half years as research editor for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. But this Fishie remembers her from her intern days at the LA Weekly.

So proud! So proud!

It’s not uncommon for veterans of the daily newspaper world to transition to the realm of PR. But it’s a little more unusual when that leap involves a non-profit organization.

Geraldine Baum, who last month announced she was exiting as New York bureau chief for the LA Times, is the new vice president of communications and marketing for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which works to re-invigorate distressed neighborhoods. She will remain in New York and work in concert with more than two dozen satellite offices around the country. Per today’s press release:

Baum spent the last 23 years as a national and foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times stationed in Washington, New York and Paris. “LISC draws all facets of a community together—sometimes literally in one room—to make it better,” she said…

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Miguel Marquez has just signed on to become CNN’s latest Los Angeles correspondent. Marquez previously worked as an assistant to former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. He was most recently a London-based correspondent for ABC News. During his tenure at the network he covered the Iraq war and the Norway massacre, among other stories.

Marquez previously worked as an Los Angeles CNN correspondent from 2003 to 2005.

The Associated Press is laying off 10 employees, reports Jim Romenesko. Among those losing their jobs is LA-based entertainment writer Rosalie Fox–who had nearly 20 years with the company. Others hit include two assistant bureau chiefs on the East Coast as well as a photo editor in San Francisco.

Romenesko also reports that the AP is ditching the premium-service personal finance wire it had run since 2008.

Looks like Poynter has found its replacement for Jim Romenesko. Director of Poynter Online Julie Moos announced today that TBD writer Andrew Beaujon has been hired to cover the media beat for MediaWire–as Romenesko is now called–and Poynter.org.

Interestingly, in writing up Beaujon’s hire, Moos went out of her way to point out that traffic at Poytner has never been better.

That dual focus brought 483,000 unique visitors to Poynter.org in January, more than any month we’ve tracked, other than May 2011 when Osama bin Laden died. That’s a 76 percent increase in unique visitors over the website’s audience in January 2011. And 25 percent of last month’s audience came between 9 and 201 times, a loyal core of visitors.

In other words: “We’re doing just fine without Jim Romenesko.”

Yes, we know—insert your own joke here: What did this person do all day? Was his informal internal CRO abbreviation SOL? And so on.

Actually, much of what John T. O’Loughlin (pictured) did before TheWrap’s Lucas Shaw got the scoop this morning that he is leaving probably involved trying to translate the incredible success of LATimes.com into equally robust revenue streams. Here’s the statement given to Shaw by LAT spokesperson Nancy Sullivan:

“John O’Loughlin has been a valued member of the Tribune Company team for over 20 years and we wish him the very best in his next endeavors. The Times is in the process of looking at both internal and external candidates to head a strong, diverse revenue team that delivered a great 2011.”

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Longtime Agence France-Press political writer Olivier Knox has joined Yahoo News as the site’s first White House correspondent. Knox spent more than a decade at AFP and covered the White House for eight years. He will report to politics editor Chris Suellentrop.

Interesting, given Yahoo’s fairly meteoric growth in news content production in recent years, they’re just now getting a White House correspondent. Here’s hoping an enterprise investigative team comes next.

Knox, obviously, will be based in DC and will formally start his new job on February 13.