Categories: OLD Media Moves

Foreign reporters on edge at WSJ

Rosie Gray of The Atlantic writes about how reporters in the foreign bureaus at The Wall Street Journal are concerned for their jobs.

Gray writes, “According to sources with knowledge of the situation, the layoffs have been widespread. The Moscow bureau has lost two reporters, reducing the size of the office — a particularly key outpost in the context of the ongoing revelations since the campaign about Russia and Trump — to just a small handful of staff. The Warsaw bureau lost one of its two reporters, and the Budapest bureau has been shut down, as has the bureau in Madrid. The one-man Riyadh bureau has also been closed. The paper’s operation in India has lost two reporters, according to a source with knowledge of the reduction. All staff in Scandinavia have been laid off except for one. The Berlin bureau is said to have been reduced by one. (Some of these layoffs were previously reported by Bloomberg and Politico.) The layoffs largely occurred in a wave on January 31.

“There’s ‘nobody left between Stockholm and Greece, and between Berlin and Moscow there is nobody’ except for the remaining reporter in Warsaw, said a former reporter in one of the European bureaus who was laid off in the latest round.

“That particular reporter was not surprised at the layoffs: ‘The writing has been on the wall for such a long time. I’ve been anticipating this for many months, not weeks, months. If not years actually.’

“But others were blindsided. According to one former reporter in an Eastern European bureau who was laid off in the latest wave, reporters in one of the bureaus in Europe were assured by their bureau chief after a wave of Journal layoffs in November that their jobs would not be affected.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.