LA Times biz editor becomes WSJ Brazil bureau chief

Wall Street Journal world editor Adam Horvath sent out the following message on Friday:

We’re pleased to announce a pair of major additions to our team in Brazil, reflecting our ever-rising ambitions in coverage of Latin America’s largest economy as the World Cup, the Olympics, falling fiscal fortunes and rising class conflicts are casting large shadows.

Marla Dickerson, business editor of the Los Angeles Times, will become Brazil bureau chief.

Marla has been directing a staff of more than 30 editors and reporters carrying out corporate and markets coverage for the L.A. Times, and previously was the deputy editor. She also is a former Mexico correspondent for the Times, its first and only full-time business reporter there.

In Mexico, Marla documented the decline of Mexican oil giant Pemex and the rise of industries now powering the nation’s growth. She profiled Carlos Slim, then-president Vicente Fox and the great-grandmother and ex-con who was Mexico’s leading sidewalk-vendor czar. Traveling the region, she has written about the influence of free trade agreements in Central America, the ethanol boom in Brazil, and why it’s so hard to decipher street addresses in Costa Rica.

For the Times she also covered beats including the California economy, renewable energy and tourism, and shared an Overseas Press Club award for a series on the rise of China. Marla earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Illinois and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Reed Johnson joins us as a general-assignment reporter specializing in society and culture in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.

Reed is uniquely qualified for this after covering Latin American culture as a roving reporter for the Times based in Mexico City, and also since his return to L.A. in 2008. In the region he has covered natural disasters, a Mexican presidential election and artist collectives in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Reed started his professional journalism career as a suburbs and city neighborhoods reporter at the Times-Union in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. Later, he spent five years at The Detroit News as a feature writer and theater critic.

Marla worked those two places, too. Marla and Reed are married. They will both report to Latin America Editor David Luhnow. With the recent addition of Juan Forero (formerly of the Washington Post) as the Colombia-based bureau chief supervising correspondents in five South American countries, David and his deputy Santiago Perez now have the management team to raise our game ever higher across Latin America.