lisa-girion-by-aaron-salcido

Lisa Girion is a top news editor for the Americas at Reuters and a former investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Before moderating the Zócalo/UCLA panel “Can Anything Stop America’s Opioid Addiction?”, she talked in the Zócalo green room about her love of her job, which you can see on her refrigerator door as well as in her method for getting the best advice to solve a problem.

 
Q: If you weren’t a journalist, what would you be?
A:
I really do not know. This is just the greatest job ever.

Q: What’s the last habit you tried to kick?
A:
Biting my nails.

Q: What’s your favorite lede you’ve ever written?
A:
I edited somebody else’s lede today that I thought was really, really good. It was something along these lines: “Dr. Anthony Fauchi doesn’t get excited about very much, and he doesn’t make house calls.”

Q: Planes, trains, or automobiles?
A:
I like trains.

Q: What does it take to get you out on a dance floor?
A:
Not very much. [Laughs.] Way too little for my kids’ appetite.

Q: Whom do you go to for advice?
A:
It depends on what the issue is, but as a journalist, I like to go to the expert or to the source, so it would be anybody I think could help me solve something. I’d find them.

Q: What’s your biggest pet peeve?
A:
I don’t like the misuse of language in social media—the sort of degradation of language on Twitter and Facebook.

Q: What are you reading right now?
A:
I just finished Jeffrey Toobin’s American Heiress: The Patty Hearst Saga, and I recommend it. And The Girls, by Emma Cline, a fictionalized version of the story of a cult and crime like the Manson murders—also very good.

Q: What’s hanging on your refrigerator?
A:
A magnet of the front page of the L.A. Times when Obama was first elected. A white board with my grocery list. That’s about it.

Q: What relaxes you?
A:
Running.

 
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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