Lead WSJ M&A reporter becoming editor

Dennis Berman, the Wall Street Journal’s lead mergers and acquisitions reporter, will becoming the Deals editor at the paper, according to a memo from managing editor Marcus Brauchli and Money & Investing editor Nik Deogun.

They wrote, “We have long excelled in this area, and Dennis will further bolster our coverage by coordinating with journalists across Dow Jones to showcase deals stories in print and online, and to explain this important part of the global financial economy.

“Reporting to Dennis will be his replacement (to be announced shortly) and the staff of Deal Journal (www.blogs.wsj.com/deals) our fast-growing website dedicated to deals and Wall Street coverage. One of his missions is to build out this area even further, exploiting the resources of the Dow Jones empire and fashioning them into the world’s pre-eminent site for deals news.

“Starting tomorrow, the best of Deal Journal will appear in print on the Deals & Dealmakers page in Money & Investing. The site already produces important coverage for the paper: today’s lead story on C1, for instance, stemmed from blog posts on Deal Journal. We look forward to continued contributions from across Dow Jones for Deal Journal.

“Dennis also will continue to work closely with our other reporters who write on Wall Street and deals: European M&A reporter Jason Singer, Deals blogger Dana Cimilluca, private-equity and big-money maven Henny Sender, hedge-fund guru Greg Zuckerman and other reporters in the U.S. and overseas. They are the best team on the Street at breaking and explaining news on deals. In addition, Dennis also will continue to write his bi-weekly column chronicling the surge of takeovers and their financing, ‘The Game.’

“Dennis has covered the hotly competitive M&A beat for three-and-a-half years, routinely beating our rivals. He joined the Journal in 2001 as a telecom reporter and technology columnist. He covered the accounting scandals at companies such as Lucent, Global Crossing and WorldCom. He was one of the Journal reporters who shared in the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for a series on the corporate turmoil of that era.A former staff editor at BusinessWeek magazine, Dennis began his career at BusinessWeek Online, and was part of the team that won the 2000 National Magazine Award for Excellence in New Media.”