Transitions 

Next week Carrie Peyton Dahlberg will take over as editor of the North Coast Journal. I'll tell you a little more about Carrie below. But first I'd like to acknowledge and thank the entire Journal team for weathering the past several months of transition.

In particular, I'd like to single out acting editor Ryan Burns and staff writer Heidi Walters. The two have been functioning more or less as co-editors, all the while keeping up on their staff writer duties and blogging. Ryan has been chief traffic cop in the editorial department, coordinating story assignments for staff, freelancers and interns, in addition to responding to the public. (Ryan declined, by the way, to apply for the permanent position of editor, preferring to return to full-time reporting.) Heidi has been handling the letters to the editor, editing copy and acting as liaison to the production department. The third and fourth legs of the stool that kept the editorial department functioning smoothly, of course, are Bob Doran, the Journal's veteran arts and culture editor, and Andrew Goff, calendar editor, cartoonist, writer and more.

And now, about the Journal's new editor:

Carrie Peyton Dahlberg is a journalist and educator whose work has appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and websites including Inside Science News Service, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Yoga Journal. She worked for 23 years at the Sacramento Bee newspaper, where she won national and regional environmental and medical reporting awards and also was an assistant city editor and copy desk chief. Before joining the Bee, Peyton Dahlberg was a reporter or editor on newspapers in California, New York state and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as a researcher for a magazine in Germany. She has a master's degree in science journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Peyton Dahlberg has taught reporting and editing courses at California State University, Sacramento, and served as a writing coach at Columbia University. She is relocating to the Eureka area with her husband, their two cats, and as she said, "far too many books."

-- Judy Hodgson