Categories: OLD Media Moves

Wessel leaving WSJ for Brookings

David Wessel, the economics editor for The Wall Street Journal, has resigned to accept a job with the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington.

Wessel will be a senior fellow and oversee the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. He will still contribute to the Journal.

In a note to the Journal staff, managing editor Gerard Baker wrote, “His contributions to the Journal’s economics coverage have been peerless. I am deeply grateful to him for all he has done over 30 years in journalism, I wish him all the very best in his new venture and I look forward to enjoying the fruits of future collaboration between us.”

Wessel currently writes the Capital column, a weekly look at the economy and forces shaping living standards around the world. He also appears frequently on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and on WETA’s “Washington Week.”

“I’ve been a daily journalist since the day after I graduated from college in 1975, and I’m finishing my 30th year at The Wall Street Journal,” said Wessel in a statement. “It’s time to try something new.”

He is the author, most recently, of “Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget” (2012). He wrote the New York Times best-seller “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic” (2009) and, with Bob Davis, “Prosperity” (1998), a look at the American middle class.

Previously, Wessel was deputy bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau. He joined the Journal in 1984 in Boston, and moved to Washington in 1987. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief.

He has worked for the Boston Globe, the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Middletown (Conn.) Press. A product of the New Haven, Conn, public schools, he graduated from Haverford College in 1975 and was a Knight Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters by Eureka College.

Wessel has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Boston Globe stories in 1983 on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other for stories in The Wall Street Journal in 2002 on corporate wrong-doing.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

View Comments

    Recent Posts

    Is this the end of CoinDesk as we know it?

    Former CoinDesk editorial staffer Michael McSweeney writes about the recent happenings at the cryptocurrency news site, where…

    5 hours ago

    LinkedIn finance editor Singh departs

    Manas Pratap Singh, finance editor for LinkedIn News Europe, has left for a new opportunity…

    1 day ago

    Washington Post announces start of third newsroom

    Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray sent out the following on Friday: Dear All, Over the last…

    2 days ago

    FT hires Moens to cover competition and tech in Brussels

    The Financial Times has hired Barbara Moens to cover competition and tech in Brussels. She will start…

    2 days ago

    Deputy tech editor Haselton departs CNBC for The Verge

    CNBC.com deputy technology editor Todd Haselton is leaving the news organization for a job at The Verge.…

    2 days ago

    “Power Lunch” co-anchor Tyler Mathisen is leaving CNBC

    Note from CNBC Business News senior vice president Dan Colarusso: After more than 27 years…

    2 days ago