By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2012
In August 2012 the Los Angeles Times handed one of its most coveted culture jobs to Joy Press — a move FishbowlLA tracked partly because Press and her husband, music critic Simon Reynolds, were a familiar LA journalism couple.
Then
Press had spent two and a half years as the Calendar section’s pop-culture and deputy television editor. A memo from editor Davan Maharaj and assistant managing editor Alice Short announced she would replace Jon Thurber as the paper’s books and culture editor.
The memo credited Press with developing a Sunday TV page and helping grow the Show Tracker blog into a key destination for television news and recaps. It also noted her own writing — on talked-about series including Girls and Game of Thrones, and profiles of Chloe Sevigny, Mindy Kaling and Enlightened creator Mike White.
FishbowlLA rounded out the portrait with the personal angle: Press had previously worked at Salon, the Village Voice, Melody Maker and SPIN, while Reynolds — her co-author on the gender-and-rock study The Sex Revolt — had just published a Guardian piece on the explosion of American electronic dance music.
Now
Joy Press eventually left newspaper editing for long-form magazine work, becoming a contributor at Vanity Fair, and in 2018 published Stealing the Show, a book about the women who reshaped television — a natural extension of the TV beat she had built at the Times.
The Los Angeles Times she joined that day no longer exists in the same form. Davan Maharaj rose to editor-in-chief and publisher before being ousted in 2017, and in 2018 biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the paper from Tronc, ending its long stretch under Chicago ownership.
Simon Reynolds has continued as one of the most prolific critics in pop-music writing, publishing further books on genre and nostalgia. The 2012 promotion reads now as a high point for the kind of well-staffed metropolitan culture desk that the subsequent decade of newspaper contraction made increasingly rare.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.