WSJ names bureau chiefs in Moscow, Turkey, Southern Europe

Gordon Fairclough, world coverage chief at The Wall Street Journal, sent out the following announcement on Friday:

All:

We are excited to announce the appointment of three great new bureau chiefs who will guide The Wall Street Journal’s global coverage. Ann Simmons is named Moscow chief, David Gauthier-Villars will direct coverage in Turkey and Marcus Walker becomes our new chief for Southern Europe.

Ann has spent more than 25 years reporting from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America, and most recently was a writer/editor covering global development at the Los Angeles Times. She is a longtime student of Russia, and served in Moscow for Time Magazine before joining the LA Times and moving to Africa to work as bureau chief in Nairobi and Johannesburg. She has also reported from Bosnia, Iraq and Haiti. She returned to Russia on a reporting fellowship in 2014. Born and raised in London, Ann holds a double honors bachelor’s degree in Russian and Norwegian from the University of East Anglia and a master’s from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She was a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 2003 and was the 2018 James H. Ottaway, Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

David heads to Istanbul after a stint as the Journal’s senior correspondent for European business, during which he focused on hacking. Previously, David served as bureau chief for the Nordics and Baltics. He joined Newswires in 1999, moved to the Journal in 2006 and served as deputy chief in Paris. He was also part of the Olympics coverage team for the Pyeongchang Winter Games in South Korea this year. Before joining Dow Jones, David worked in Russia as a freelance reporter and was editor-in-chief of “La Gazette,” a weekly for French speakers in Moscow. David has a master’s degree in Russian and East-European studies from Sciences-Po university in Paris as well as a degree in economics.

Marcus, meanwhile, has moved to Rome, where he will oversee coverage of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Marcus has worked for the Journal in a variety of roles in Europe since 2000, covering European banking, economics, politics, migration and terrorism. He helped lead the Journal’s coverage of Europe’s debt crisis, which won Overseas Press Club and other awards and was a Pulitzer finalist. He has been Athens bureau chief and acting Berlin bureau chief, and has reported from almost everywhere in Europe from Iceland to the Aegean. A British citizen, father of two, and speaker of German, Italian and Greek, Marcus previously worked at the London defense and foreign-affairs think tank RUSI, and has degrees from Oxford in international relations and philosophy, politics and economics.

Please join us in congratulating Ann, David and Marcus on their new roles.