Good Housekeeping

Before I get into the Weekly housekeeping stuff, let me be the 3,484th person to wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah and a gleeful whatever-the-heck-else.

And now, the housekeeping: The four regular writers for our Currents section got together for a festive lunch, along with yours truly, at the Cup Café last week in order to divide the world up into overly simplistic categories, for the purpose of making sure we're covering everything that we should.

In other words, we divvied up beats.

Here's who's covering what:

· Jim Nintzel, jnintzel@tucsonweekly.com: the city of Tucson, the state Legislature, Pima County, UFOs.

· Saxon Burns, sburns@tucsonweekly.com: the University of Arizona, Pima County (Saxon's splitting it with Jim, but taking the lead), GLBT issues, crime/courts, poltergeists.

· Dave Devine, ddevine@tucsonweekly.com: the various school boards, neighborhood issues, Oro Valley, Marana.

· Tim Vanderpool, tvanderpool@tucsonweekly.com: environmental issues, South Tucson, prisons/corrections.

This shoring up of beats is something we should have done long ago, but it's something we definitely needed to do following the loss of Chris Limberis. These beats don't mean that the writers won't be covering other things, and the writers will occasionally delve into topics that may fall within another person's beat. This is just a basic framework to decide who's covering what.

And in other news, we have a new staff photographer. Jason Swift has come on board following the departure of Tricia McInroy. Jason is a graduate of NAU, where he earned a bachelor's degree in photography; he's been freelancing for us and some other publications. Welcome aboard, Jason.