WSJ names Brown its financial enterprise editor

Wall Street Journal financial editor Charles Forelle sent out the following announcement on Tuesday:

I’m thrilled to announce that Ken Brown is our new Financial Enterprise Editor.

Do I need to introduce you to Ken, an immensely skilled and deeply traveled editor? Doubtful.

For the past two and a half years, Ken has been Heard editor, presiding over a daily wonder of tightly argued commentary. He is leaving Heard ascendant, having pioneered successful series and the big Saturday Heard for Exchange. He’s begun an expansion in the Heard staff that will take it still higher.

Ken joined the Journal in 2000 and has had a guiding hand on some of the biggest stories of the era. Ken has been a mutual-fund reporter, a Heard on the Street writer, deputy technology editor, real-estate chief, and Hong Kong bureau chief and Asia finance editor. And he ran Money & Investing between 2008 and 2011–a period in which there was, to say the least, a lot going on. (He took a detour out of journalism and into investment management in the mid-2000s but found his way back home.)

Ken has an incomparable store of financial knowledge and a deep well of story ideas. He is a generous colleague who shares his wisdom and judgment with the whole Finance team.

And Ken is a master of the Big Story. In Asia, he spearheaded our epic reporting on the 1MDB scandal–surely among the most complex pieces of financial investigative work in recent memory. Before that, he led a superb, long-running series on surging debt in China. He teaches investigative reporting at Columbia.

This will all serve him and us and our readers well in his new job. As Financial Enterprise Editor, Ken will run our team of enterprise reporters and also help with enterprise work across the Finance group. He starts now but will continue to steer the Heard while we search for a successor. (If you are interested, talk to me.)

Special thanks are owed to Chris Stewart, who is similarly keeping his hands on the great work he started as Financial Enterprise Editor while also doing his new job as a Deputy Editor on the Investigative team.

Please join me in congratulating Ken–and talk to him about stories!

-Charles