Dowell named editor of Asia Pacific for WSJ

Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker sent out the following announcement on Monday:

I’m delighted to announce that Andrew Dowell is named Editor, Asia Pacific.

He will succeed Paul Beckett, who is moving to be our Washington bureau chief early next year.

Drew will lead our large and talented team in Asia to new heights of journalistic endeavor. Next month we mark the 40^th anniversary of the launch of The Asian Wall Street Journal and it’s an opportune time for us to recommit ourselves to this most dynamic region of the world economy. Drew will build on the splendid reporting and analysis we have done in the last few years and will work closely with our business colleagues to develop products that can tap Asia’s increasing demand for world class journalism.

Drew has been our deputy financial editor for the past year, helping oversee coverage of the meltdown in Chinese markets, the descent of interest rates into negative territory and the brazen theft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s account at the New York Fed.

He spent the previous five and a half years as chief of the Journal’s Corporate Bureau, where he ran coverage of retail and consumer products, telecom and big industrials. His team broke news of GE’s plan to exit the lending business and Sprint’s failed attempt to buy rival T-Mobile. Before that, he was deputy managing editor of the Ticker at Dow Jones Newswires — a post that involved running coverage of banks and hedge funds while helping oversee all company coverage. He took that job after heading up energy coverage for the Newswires for several years.

This isn’t Drew’s first extended sojourn abroad. He joined Dow Jones as a stringer in Cairo where he was based for six years, picking up rudimentary Arabic while writing about everything from snap wheat tenders to the divestiture of the state-owned beer company to the man who now owns American Pharoah. He’s an Oklahoma native who spent his early years in Iran and earned a history degree at Emory University. He lives with his wife and two daughters in New Jersey.