LAobserved.com is reporting on the latest round of forced/voluntary retirements at the Los Angeles Times and noted that the Orange County bureau will lose Bill Lobdell.
Lobdell has served the Times in numerous capacities, including as editor of the Daily Pilot, which covers Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. In recent years, he proved to be an excellent investigative reporter, uncovering a series of sensational church scandals plaguing Southern California.
But we've learned that it's not just Lobdell. Veteran Times OC reporters David Reyes and David Haldane will also be departing.
By my calculations, this latest round of personnel moves leaves just eight reporters in Orange County for the paper.
“We found out yesterday,” said one source. “It was sad. Hopefully, that's the end [of layoffs] for us.”
— R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.