WSJ names new Dallas bureau chief

Alex Martin, the national editor and deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, made the following staff announcement on Thursday:

I’m pleased to announce the promotion of Leslie Eaton to Dallas bureau chief.

Leslie joined the Journal in 2008 as deputy bureau chief in Dallas, covering regional news ranging from politics and economics to the sudden eruption of “crazy ants” in Houston. She also played a key role in our Deepwater Horizon coverage, and has helped chronicle the budget woes of state and local governments across the country.

Before the Journal, she spent almost 15 years at the New York Times, writing about Wall Street and stock fraud for the business section, and covering the regional economy, courts, politics and the aftermath of 9/11 for metro. For the national desk, she spent several years travelling to the Gulf Coast to write about the region’s efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

But before all of that, she spent from 1987 to 1993 at Barron’s, where, she was, among other things, the magazine’s first mutual-funds columnist. She thinks she still has the DJ number she got when she worked there.

Born in Bronxville, N.Y., she went to high school in Tulsa, Okla., and has the snap shirts and boots to prove it. She has B.A. in history from Yale and a M.S. in journalism from Columbia, and lives in Dallas with her husband, Mark Vamos, and their daughter Lizzie.