Ryan Fonseca joins The Times as its Essential California newsletter writer

The following announcement was sent on behalf of Head of Newsletters Karim Doumar:

Ryan Fonseca has joined the Los Angeles Times as our new Essential California writer. He’s the first reporter to join the Newsletters team full-time.

Fonseca was most recently a reporter at KPCC-FM (89.3) and LAist, where he covered road safety, infrastructure and transit in the greater L.A. area. He was also a digital editor at the Southern California News Group and a web editor for Times Community News.

Fonseca started Nov. 14 and began writing Essential California on Nov. 28. He hopes to infuse more voice and features into the newsletter and aims to build a sense of community in the inboxes of his subscribers.

He also plans to focus on highlighting solutions to the Golden State’s problems. As he wrote in his first newsletter, “I’ll seek out and highlight new and overlooked ideas and the people behind them — all while maintaining a journalistic rigor that interrogates potential solutions. Some guiding questions: What is being done here and elsewhere to address this issue? Is it working? If it’s outside California, could it work here?”