Jason Dean, the bureau chief of the joint Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones Newswires bureau in Chicago, sent out the following staff announcements on Thursday afternoon:
We’re pleased to announce that Jon Ostrower has joined the bureau to cover Boeing and the commercial aerospace beat. Already one of the most prominent journalists in this sector, Jon comes to us from Reed Business Information’s Flight International Magazine, where he developed and ran the popular FlightBlogger blog — and amassed thousands of Twitter followers.
Jon will replace David Kesmodel, who is becoming assistant news editor heading up the bureau’s agriculture coverage. An accomplished corporate reporter for the Journal, David will oversee a team of five reporters filing on agribusiness companies and commodities markets for real-time, online and print.
Mark Peters, who has led the ag team with distinction for the past 19 months, will jump to the bureau’s U.S. News team to write about Midwest economic issues and other subjects in our 12-state region.
A graduate of Boston College with a degree in English, Mark joined Dow Jones four years ago as a reporter in New York after stints covering business, economics and politics at his hometown paper, The Hartford Courant, and The Portland Press Herald in Maine. He was promoted to run the Chicago agriculture team in September 2010, and has helped revamp and upgrade the coverage while also traveling the region widely to report his own features–learning valuable skills along the way like how not to upset a pregnant cow when walking through a pen and how to eat BBQ in Kansas City without ruining a shirt.
David started his career in 1994 patrolling the sidelines of high-school football games for his hometown paper, The Herald-Times of Bloomington, Ind. He joined WSJ.com in 2005 as a technology reporter in New York, where he began a successful journey through the “sin” beats, writing first about topics like online gambling and Internet pornography, and then, after joining the Chicago bureau in 2007, beer, liquor, and tobacco as well as food retail and the popular Midwestern game “cornhole,” about which he wrote an A-Hed. Along the way, he penned a book about Internet domain names. David has a bachelor’s degree in history from Indiana University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Missouri.
An aerospace enthusiast since childhood, Jon started FlightBlogger five years ago as a hobby, and turned it into one of the most widely read sources of information and analysis on Boeing and its suppliers during the pivotal period when the aerospace giant was completing development of its Dreamliner. During that time he accrued millions of page views, more than 17,000 Twitter followers, a half million miles in the air, and an uneven number of take-offs and landings, having let himself be thrown out of an airplane over Las Vegas for a story. Jon, a Boston native, is a graduate of the school of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.
