WSJ hires Pratt as education bureau chief

Chastity Pratt

The Wall Street Journal has hired Chastity Pratt as its education bureau chief.

Pratt will be based in Detroit, and she will start on June 15.

Pratt covered Michigan’s cities and urban affairs for Bridge. She joined the Bridge team from the Detroit Free Press after more than a decade of providing authoritative coverage of Detroit Public Schools.

Pratt played an integral part in the Detroit Journalism Cooperative, a five-year collaboration of digital, TV, radio and ethnic media that co-reported on stories such as the Flint water crisis, Detroit municipal bankruptcy filing and Trump-era deportations. In a constantly-evolving content provider role, she told stories across platforms and reimagined content for both shared and divergent audiences.

Her work also has appeared in USA Today, Essence Magazine, on PBS, NPR and CNN. Pratt is currently a Nieman fellow at Harvard studying how multimedia storytelling can amplify stories that advocate for education finance reform while maintaining journalistic integrity.

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.