The newest local editor at the fast-spreading network of Southern California Patch websites is Ajay Singh (pictured), officially now watching over all things Eagle Rock. What’s unusual about his background is that he is one of the first area Patch LE’s that we are aware of with a largely international media background.

Writes Singh on his Eagle Rock Patch profile page:

I started out in journalism in 1988 at the New Delhi bureau of the Wall Street Journal Asia, went on to the Associated Press and eventually to Asiaweek, a Time Inc. news weekly in Hong Kong. For six years until 2009, I was a writer and editor at an online newspaper and quarterly magazine at UCLA.

Later on in his answers to the standard Patch local editor Q&A, he notes cheekily that “coming from a country rooted in a 3,000-year-old civilization, I also strongly support preserving local history and architecture, which isn’t something Los Angeles is particularly known for.”

Online comment-congrats have started to come in for Singh, including one from Patch LA regional editor Patrick Lee, an alumnus of Eagle Rock’s Occidental College.