WSJ hires Youssef in the DC bureau

Wall Street Journal Washington bureau chief Paul Beckett sent out the following announcement:

All: please welcome Nancy Youssef to the Washington bureau, covering the intelligence aspects of national security.

Nancy joins us from BuzzFeed and was previously at the Daily Beast. In her new role, she will be working close with Shane Harris on the intel beat and she has already put her Pentagon reporting knowledge to good use in our reporting on the disaster that befell the USS John McCain.

Nancy is a Washington D.C. native and a graduate of the University of Virginia and Georgetown University. She began reporting on national security in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and she traveled to – and lived in — Iraq for the first four years of the war. She first covered the Pentagon in 2007 and stayed until the Arab Spring drew her back to the region to cover Egypt for two years. She also has reported extensively from Libya, Afghanistan, and Bahrain. Both of her parents are Egyptian.

We have been building our national security team this year to reflect the priority that the subject has as a key part of our Washington coverage. With Nancy on board, and Gordon, Dion and Ben covering the Pentagon, Paul Sonne will move to cover foreign policy and the State Department with Felicia on the national security team.

Thanks and best,
Paul