Some New Faces at VOSD

We’ve had to say goodbye to two VOSD stalwarts recently as crack political reporter Rani Gupta split for some big fancy law school and investigative wild man Will Carless moved his wonderful family to Indonesia.

They’ll be tough to replace, but I’ve done my best — and we’ve even added a third position for good measure. I just finalized the last hire yesterday and wanted to introduce you to some of the new names and faces you’ll see around here in the coming months.

They’ll each introduce themselves personally when they get here (as Adrian Florido belatedly did yesterday). But for now, here’s a little bit about them:

• Liam Dillon starts Monday as our new political reporter and joins us from the Naples Daily News, where his work included a three-part investigative series on Ave Maria, a town founded by the Domino’s Pizza magnate whose bizarre bylaws could leave its residents without democratic representation on the City Council; some good digging on the local basketball coach’s claims on his resume; and a gripping tale of a wounded vet.

  You’ll be able to reach him soon at liam.dillon@voiceofsandiego.org. He’ll also be taking over The Hall blog.

• Dagny Salas is currently interning on the metro desk at The Washington Post and has interned at the St. Petersburg Times, Hartford Courant and USA Today, in addition to working on Medill’s Innocence Project at Northwestern (where she recently graduated). And she already has a little bit of the VOSD spirit. She was part of a group of students that were unhappy with their college newspaper. So guess what they did? Started their own web-only publication.

  Dagny will be our inaugural fellow, working on daily stories, investigations and helping out in other ways such as copy editing. The fellowship lasts for one year and she’ll begin near the end of September.

• Keegan Kyle is currently the public safety reporter for the Green Bay Press Gazette and will be our new public safety reporter, replacing Carless. In Green Bay, and at internships with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Orange County Register, he showed ambition and imagination in his stories, which included this investigation that showed the city’s response time for requests to fill potholes was slower in minority neighborhoods.

  He’ll be starting in a little less than a month.

I’m really excited to begin working with all three of them.

— ANDREW DONOHUE