We’ve got some newsroom staffing changes to tell you about.

Joe Wojtas, The Day’s Stonington/Mystic reporter since 1992, and for many years a part-time night editor, will take on the role of Night News Editor beginning Aug. 15. We’re thrilled to work with our longtime colleague and friend in this new role. He’s an excellent reporting and writing coach with great news judgment and extensive knowledge of the region.

“Joe has been an aggressive reporter with deep knowledge of his community for three decades at The Day, while also serving on the night desk two days a week,” Executive Editor Tim Cotter wrote in an announcement to the newsroom. “As a full-time editor he will have even more impact on the newsroom, working with reporters on their reporting and writing and, when necessary, guiding them through the FOI process.”

Wojtas is not crazy about weather stories. “It’s winter in New England. It snows,” or “It’s summer in New England. It’s hot,” he’ll say at the suggestion that we assign reporters and photographers to write about the forecast.

Give him a hard news story, like priest abuse in the Catholic church, the yearslong controversy about a local high school teacher or a political coverup, Wojtas is in his element. He’s argued successfully to the state Freedom of Information Commission many times for release of documents.

Beat changes for reporting staff

Beginning Monday, reporter Johana Vazquez will be covering New London while finishing up a series of stories she’s writing for our Housing Solutions Lab about the former Crystal Avenue high-rise through the generations and affordable housing. Vazquez, a fearless and persistent reporter, joined The Day last year, covering Montville and Waterford before being assigned to our Housing Solutions Lab investigative team in April.

Staff Writer Greg Smith, who most recently covered New London, will be on the cops and courts beat starting Monday. I can attest first hand that Smith knows his way around criminal justice reporting, having competed with him when he was with The Bulletin and I was covering courts for The Day. He joined us in 2012 and has done a fantastic job covering our home city.

Kevin Arnold joined us earlier this summer as the Montville and Waterford reporter and has already written great stories from both towns — including this week’s report on a Montville Housing Authority commissioner charged with harassing tenants.

Fair winds to our departing co-workers

Sadly, the newsroom is losing two talented and creative co-workers, designer Maria Reagan and Night City Editor Jacinta Meyers. In announcing Reagan’s departure, Executive Editor Cotter wrote in an email to the staff, in part, that Reagan “has continued the long tradition at The Day of understated elegance, has done an outstanding job designing our Daybreak section, has been the go-to person whenever we needed a logo for a series and played an integral role in the design and redesign or our website.“

Cotter wrote that it would take too long to list everything Meyers has done on the night city desk, “from editing copy, listening to the scanner, working with reporters, communicating with the copy desk, and serving as a systems ’super user’ at night who put out a lot of tech fires.”

Meyers is a visual artist as well as a wordsmith, and you might remember the award-winning series of political cartoons she created along with former Editorial Page Editor Paul Choiniere.

We said goodbye, for now, to one of our summer interns, Julia Walker, this week. Walker, who is entering her junior year at Syracuse University, spent the summer investigating housing and health issues and we’ll be publishing her stories in September as we roll out the first installment of our community-funded Housing Solutions Lab content.

This is the opinion of Karen Florin, The Day’s engagement editor. She can be reached at k.florin@theday.com and (860) 701-4217.