Scratch the top editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune off the wish list of candidates for the executive editor job at the LA Times.

“I respect the heck out of the LA Times, but I politely declined to be a candidate,” Rene Sanchez told Media Ink.

He had served as the LA Bureau chief for the Washington Post from 1998 to 2004 before joining the Star Tribune. The New Orleans native advanced through its reporting and editorial ranks and supervised a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013. He’s served at various times as Sunday editor, metro editor, sports editor and managing editor. He landed the top job in 2018.

Kevin Merida, a VP and editor-in-chief of The Undefeated at ESPN, remains very much on the radar. Sources say that staffers at the Washington Post as well as the LA Times have reached out to him. Merida declined to comment.

Gimlet Media Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen is another name that has bubbled up in recent weeks, but sources say that Polgreen, who was editor-in-chief at the Huffington Post and earlier was at the New York Times is enjoying her time running Gimlet. She did not return a call seeking comment.

Janice Min, a contributing editor at Time and a former top editor and CEO of the Hollywood Reporter and US Weekly, is also said to be in the running as are several internal candidates.

Norm Pearlstine announced he was leaving in October and officially stepped away in December. Originally, the hope was to have a candidate selected by the end of March, but the search appears to be taking longer than expected, and nobody has been presented to the LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the health care billionaire who is said to be heavily involved in trying to develop easy-to-administer COVID-19 vaccines.