Tanouye to leave Wall Street Journal

Elyse Tanouye, who in May was named to the new position of content development editor at The Wall Street Journal, is leaving the paper.

In an email to the staff, managing editor Gerard Baker wrote Tuesday:

Elyse Tanouye, our longtime colleague, who has held many key roles in a distinguished 25-year career with the Journal, has decided to leave Dow Jones to pursue a personal project. After joining the newspaper as a reporter straight out of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, Elyse became a stellar bureau chief for the Health & Science group, where she oversaw some of our most talented reporters and most ambitious stories. As a reporter and editor, she was a central force in dozens of prize-winning stories, including the Journal’s coverage of breakthroughs in AIDS therapies in the mid-1990s, which won the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting.

As Corporate Editor beginning in 2008, Elyse undertook the difficult job of reorienting our business coverage to be newsier and much more real-time, building a very strong editing desk that today is a bedrock of our newsroom. As Deputy Managing Editor for Standards and Ethics she strove to uphold our highest editorial standards and systematize them further across our growing organization. Most recently, as editor developing new channels for WSJ content, she has pursued ways to extend our reach into new platforms including e-books.

Along with all of you, I am deeply grateful for Elyse’s many achievements in her time here, from the difficult tasks she willingly tackled to the example set by her journalism. I know you will all join me in thanking her for all she has done for the Journal and Dow Jones and in wishing her every success in her new ventures.