Senior-level editors, D.C. correspondent join Sun

Tuesday, May 2, 2006 | 7:26 a.m.

Two senior-level editors have joined the Las Vegas Sun, Michael J. Kelley, managing editor, announced Monday. Kelley also announced the hiring of a new Sun Washington correspondent.

Charlie Waters, who recently took early retirement from the Fresno (Calif.) Bee, where he had been executive editor and senior vice president for the last eight years, will be an assistant managing editor at the Sun. He will work with staff members on their reporting and writing skills.

After graduating from the University of Arizona in 1969, Waters was editor and publisher of newspapers in, successively, Bullhead City and Prescott, Ariz., and an assistant city editor and night/weekend editor at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. From 1986 to 1990 he was assistant managing editor, managing editor and then executive editor of the Reno Gazette-Journal.

From 1990 to 1998 he worked at the Los Angeles Times, the last two years as senior editor, then executive editor, of the Times Sunday Magazine before going to Fresno.

Chris Morris, a Texas native and 1987 graduate of East Texas State University in Commerce, left his position as presentation director at the Dallas Morning News, where he managed the graphics, illustration and design departments, to join the Sun. At the Sun, as art director, he will be responsible for graphics and illustrations.

Morris was a staff artist for the Dallas Times-Herald for two years and for the San Francisco Examiner for five years before going to work for the Morning News in 1994 as a staff artist/designer. From there he worked his way through a succession of positions to head three departments.

The new Washington correspondent is Lisa Mascaro who, beginning in 1998, was a reporter, bureau chief and assistant city editor at the Los Angeles Daily News. A 1989 graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, she was a reporter for the San Antonio Light and The Outlook of Santa Monica, Calif., before going to the Daily News.

"These three additions to the Sun staff," Kelley said, "are all top-flight journalists who will be instrumental in keeping the Sun the newspaper of significance in Las Vegas. We, and our readers, were lucky to get them."