WSJ names investigations editor, staffers

Wall Street Journal managing editor Gerard Baker sent out the following staff announcement on Tuesday:

I’m delighted to announce several appointments that will strengthen our investigations team, enhance our data-reporting resources and advance our push into immersive storytelling so that we can broaden and extend our storytelling capacity in the emerging digital era.

Mike Siconolfi is appointed Editor, Investigations, forming a new group that will combine our existing teams of investigative reporters and data reporters under one roof. Mike’s team, working closely with the senior newsroom leadership, will be tasked with producing more and more frequent investigations off news events, developing revelatory running enterprise stories and executing ambitious projects. As part of its mandate, the team will interact closely with editors and reporters across the entire news organization, with a charge to deepen the investigative and data skills of the entire staff. Mike’s team will have one overriding objective: to shine the public light of accountability into the darker recesses of the corporate, political, legal, governmental and financial worlds.

Mike, a 30-year veteran of the Journal, is uniquely suited to this vital role. As a reporter who covered Wall Street and as a deputy in Money & Investing and senior editor reporting to Page One, he has both broken and overseen many memorable stories in the past two decades, including revelations in a bond-trading scandal at Kidder Peabody that triggered the CEO’s ouster and General Electric’s sale of the firm; an investigation detailing collusion in the Treasury-bond market; series on research-analyst conflicts and on IPO “spinning,” which led to multiple investigations and new regulatory rules; the coverage of NYSE pay practices that led to the departure of CEO Dick Grasso; and the insider-trading, political-intelligence and high-speed trading stories we’ve run in recent years. Mike will report to Rebecca Blumenstein.

A crucial component of Mike’s team will be an enhanced data journalism effort that will be led by Tom McGinty and Rob Barry. Expanding our data reporting capability in a data-rich age is a priority, and Tom and Rob and their team will be working with all of you to deepen our data literacy. Tom has been an investigative reporter at the Journal since 2008, where his subjects have included grading abuses in the New York State Regents Exams, class-action trial attorneys who plied state-level officials with campaign donations to secure them as clients and the questionable surgical history of an Oregon spine surgeon who lost his license to practice as a result of the Journal’s stories. Rob has been an investigative reporter at the Journal since 2011, where his topics have included healthcare, foreign and domestic elections, airline safety and student loans. In one memorable piece, he worked with Greg White to analyze Russian parliamentary results that pointed to widespread fraud; more recently, he has worked on a series of stories about trading by corporate insiders and an investigation into the migratory patterns of troubled stockbrokers.

Mike Allen will take on a newly created role as Assistant Managing Editor, Enterprise Projects. Mike led the way into a new arena of storytelling last year with his visionary stewardship of and enthusiasm for the extraordinary Trials project. I’ve asked him to take us much further in using the terrific new tools available to us to tell stories in a digital age, which truly open many new pathways to inform and delight our readers. Mike will bring his own well-known gifts for narrative to the task of building an interactive team that cuts across departments to bring new dimensions to many of our best stories.

Mike got his start at the Journal in 1986 writing about the civil war in Nicaragua, and has dedicated the decades since covering all manner of conflict, foreign and domestic.  In the Dallas bureau, his beats included banks, insurers and the PC business. He edited the paper’s first regional publication, Texas Journal, then moved to New York as assistant foreign editor, overseeing coverage of the emerging-market debt crisis.  He created a money-laundering beat for the paper and spent the better part of a year getting to know shady people in sunny places, including Antigua financier Allen Stanford.  After stints as a Page One editor and Latin America bureau chief, he became deputy Page One editor.  As global enterprise editor, he has helped shape some of the most important stories the Journal has produced in recent years, and I am grateful for the work he has done there. In his new role, he will continue to report to Alex Martin.

Please join me in congratulating Mike, Rob, Tom and Mike in their important new roles.