Reuters hires WSJ’s page one editor to be enterprise editor

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Mike Williams, the page one editor of The Wall Street Journal, has resigned from the business newspaper to become the enterprise editor at Reuters.

Williams will be replaced by deputy managing editor Alix Freedman as page one editor.

Under new editor in chief Steve Adler, Reuters has hired a number of former Journal staffers to beef up its management. Adler previously worked at the Journal before running BusinessWeek magazine. He joined Reuters in early 2010 and became editor in chief earlier this year.

Before being page one editor, Williams was the editor of the Journal’s Europe edition. An 18-year veteran of the Journal, Williams was previously based in Paris where he was the Journal’s Southern Europe bureau chief. As head of the Europe edition, Williams was responsible for coverage of Europe, the Middle East and Africa for all editions of the Journal.

A Harvard graduate, Williams joined the Journal’s Tokyo bureau in 1992 as news editor and later became Japanese economy and political correspondent. In 1996, he moved to New York as assistant foreign editor for the Journal, returning to Japan as Tokyo bureau chief in 1999.

Freedman joined the Philadelphia bureau of the Journal as a reporter in June 1984. She moved to the New York bureau in 1987, covering the food and tobacco industry and was promoted to senior special writer in July 1991. From November 1979 to December 1982, Freedman worked as a news assistant for The New York Times. In January 1983, she become a staff reporter for BusinessWeek magazine.

In 1993, Freedman won a Gerald Loeb Award in the large newspaper category for her front-page article “Fire Power,” an examination of how a secretive Southern California family dominates the market for low-priced handguns frequently used in crimes. She was a 1994 Gerald Loeb finalist in the large newspaper category for her investigative article “Peddling Dreams,” which examined the economics of the rent-to-own industry and its effects on America’s poor.

In 1993, she and Journal reporter Laurie Cohen received the Front Page Award for specialized writing from the Newswomen’s Club of New York for their article, “Smoke and Mirrors: How Cigarette Makers Keep Health Question ‘Open’ Year After Year.” In 1996 she won a Pulitzer Prize in the national affairs category for her ongoing coverage of the tobacco industry.

Prior to assuming her current position in December 2005, she was an assistant managing editor, beginning in December 2004.  Freedman was a senior editor from 2002 to 2004. Before that, she was the Journal’s investigative projects editor from 1999 to 2002.