March 20, 2007

Ted B. Kissell Named Editor of OC Weekly

Award-winning reporter and editor Ted B. Kissell has been named editor-in-chief at OC Weekly, Village Voice Media announced today. He officially starts on April 2.

Though he has most recently served as a senior editor at the daily Ventura County Star, where he oversees the breaking news team and courts reporters, Kissell’s move south to Santa Ana will mark his return to alternative journalism.

A 1990 journalism graduate of Northwestern University, Kissell previously worked as a staff writer at Miami New Times and as an associate editor at New Times Broward-Palm Beach, where he was a national finalist in the John Bartlow Martin Awards for Public Interest Magazine Journalism and the recipient of numerous first-place awards in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Green Eyeshade Awards, including honors for both deadline and non-deadline reporting. He left Florida in 2003 to accept a Fulbright Scholarship to study bilingual education among the indigenous peoples of Mexico. After moving to Los Angeles with his wife in 2004, he convinced the Los Angeles Times to give him a job editing its monthly employee publication before heading to Ventura last year.

Kissell’s arrival coincides with several other new hires at the Santa Ana paper. Art director Jose Santos, presently an associate art director at Tu Ciudad magazine in Los Angeles, also starts on April 2, and music editor Dave Segal, formerly of Alternative Press and Seattle’s The Stranger, takes the helm in music on March 26. The paper has also hired Luke Y. Thompson as its newest staff writer. Thompson, a longtime news writer and film and arts critic for Village Voice Media papers such as LA Weekly, started at OC Weekly last week.