Reuters hires Southern Europe bureau chief from WSJ

Reuters managing editor Paul Ingrassia and Editor of Europe, Middle East and Africa Michael Stott sent out the following hiring announcement on Monday:

We are pleased to announce that a distinguished Reuters alumna, Alessandra Galloni, is rejoining the company as Southern Europe Bureau Chief and Enterprise Editor at Large this fall.

Based in Rome, Alessandra will oversee our news bureaus in Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal, reporting to EMEA Editor Michael Stott. She begins in September.

Alessandra will succeed Barry Moody, who has led the southern European bureaus with distinction for the last three years while they were at the centre of the euro zone crisis. Most recently, he led our superb coverage of the papal and Italian elections and the latter’s turbulent aftermath.  Barry, one of our most experienced correspondents and editorial managers, will leave Rome at the scheduled end of his assignment in late September. His next post will be announced in due course.

Alessandra returns from The Wall Street Journal, where she spent 12 years in London, Paris, Milan and Rome. There she covered European corporate beats including advertising, media and luxury goods, and was chief political and economic correspondent in Italy and later in France. She ran the WSJ’s Southern Europe bureau between 2006 and 2011, and has since been running the combined Italy bureau of the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.

After a year at the Associated Press, Alessandra began her career in earnest at Reuters in 1996 on the Italian-language service in Rome, covering politics and the economy, before switching to general and political news on the international side. In 1999 she moved to London, where she took on the UK transport beat, covering British Airways, the dying UK auto industry and the seasonal leaves-on-tracks paralysis of the British railway system.

Alessandra led a team that won an Overseas Press Club Award in 2004 for coverage of the Parmalat scandal, and received the UK Business Journalist of the Year Award in 2005. This year, she co-wrote “From the End of the Earth to Rome,” an e-book on Pope Francis.