Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson sent out the following announcement to the staff on Friday:
I am delighted to announce the promotion of Gren “mano-a-mano” Manuel to the post of Newswires Senior Editor for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, succeeding Marcus Wright. Gren, a 10-year Dow Jones veteran, has served as editor of EMEA news coverage since 2007. He will remain at Newswires’ European headquarters in London and report to Neal Lipschutz.
As previously announced, Marcus is moving to Dubai in January to take up the newly created post of Editor of our joint Newswires/Journal Middle East bureau.
Gren is well prepared for his new role, having spent seven years managing chunks of EMEA reporting for Newswires. He now oversees all day-to-day Newswires coverage, crafted by some 350 journalists in more than 30 bureaus in the region. He serves as the Newswires representative on London’s European Hub, which he helped to establish.
An admirably restless and creative spirit, Gren recast our coverage of European equities and was in the algorithmic avant-garde. He has designed programs that automatically publish headlines and nurtured the Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator, a proprietary tool for predicting US economic trends.
Gren joined Dow Jones in Hong Kong as a reporter for The Asian Wall Street Journal in 2000. He transferred to London as a reporter for Newswires in 2001, and won a William R. Clabby Dow Jones Newswires Award for his reporting in 2002. He then led EMEA TMT coverage before being promoted in 2004 to head EMEA equities coverage. Gren has a degree in computing science from Imperial College, London, speaks Cantonese and, crucially, plays the harmonica.
Please join me in congratulating Gren on his important new assignment.