The Wall Street Journal has hired Jamie Butters to be its Detroit bureau chief, overseeing automotive and manufacturing coverage.
Butters is currently executive editor of Automotive News, a Crain publication. He joined the organization as its chief content officer in 2018. His last day at Automotive News will be July 18, and he will start at The Journal on Aug. 1.
Butters has covered the auto industry in Detroit for more than two decades: first at the Detroit Free Press for eight years as a reporter and editor, then serving 10 years at Bloomberg News in Detroit, mostly as an editor and team leader.
His first auto show was Tokyo in ’97, when he wrote for the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky about a new kind of car called a hybrid and how Toyota saw it as a steppingstone to cars powered purely by electricity and eventually by hydrogen fuel cells.
Butters studied journalism at the University of Iowa, graduated with a degree in finance from the University of Kentucky and studied China and its economy as a Knight Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.
