WSJ names three deputy world coverage chiefs

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

It is my great pleasure to (finally) name our deputy world coverage chiefs: Deborah Ball in London, David Crawshaw in Hong Kong and Brendan Moran in New York.

Deb is a Journal veteran who has served in multiple European posts, most recently as Rome-based editor for Southern Europe, overseeing our coverage of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. In her latest role she has spurred great journalism on everything from Italy’s banking crises and Greece’s debt woes to Pope Francis’s Vatican and last year’s terrorist attacks in Barcelona. Deb joined the paper as a reporter in Italy, covering, among other things, the European luxury-goods industry. She later moved to London to cover big European food and booze companies and then spent several years as the paper’s Switzerland reporter, where she wrote about tax cheats, Swiss banks, Nestle and quixotic popular referendums. Following the stint in Zurich, Deb moved back to Italy for a roving pan-European corporate beat. She was named Italy bureau chief in 2013. A Boston native, Deb is a graduate of Tufts and Columbia. She is also the author of ‘House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival.’

David has been the Hong Kong-based world editor for Asia since June 2017. He has played a central role in guiding our general, political and economic news coverage from across the region – editing stories on Kim Jong Un’s North Korea and its nuclear standoff with the United States, South China Sea tensions, Philippines President Duterte’s bloody war on drugs and many other critical topics. David joined the Journal in London in 2009 and performed several editing jobs there over the years. He then managed the Asia editing desk in Hong Kong from 2013 to 2015, overseeing digital publishing from the region, before moving to New York. In headquarters, he served stints on the world and markets desks. Along the way, David, an Australian, also acquired an appreciation of burritos. Before Dow Jones, David was an editor on newspapers in London and spent four years as a political reporter for the Australian Associated Press in Sydney and Canberra. Earlier, as a reporter at the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser, he covered the great legal-brothel controversy of 2003. David graduated from the University of Queensland.

Brendan has been part of the world team at the Journal for several years, serving as deputy to Adam Horvath and, most recently, as my acting deputy since the autumn, helping keep the world ship from running aground during the transition. During that time, Brendan has played an important role in running our global coverage of everything from major terror attacks and conflict to economic upheaval in Venezuela. Brendan joined the Journal in 2010 and worked on the hub’s homepage team for a couple of years before becoming the paper’s weekend editor. Before that, Brendan was executive editor at a group of weeklies in Maine, where he had to be a jack of all trades, working with reporters, writing editorials and soothing the occasional irate subscriber. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, he started in journalism as a reporter at Maine’s Lewiston Sun Journal and New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor. He lives with his wife and 4-year-old twins in Mount Vernon, where he also very occasionally bangs on an old Corona Standard.

Our aim is to create a truly global team to more seamlessly drive our economic, political and general news coverage, working closely with bureau chiefs and reporters around the world and across time zones. I will organize some town hall conference calls for the foreign staff – probably two because of time differences – next week. In the meantime, please join me in congratulating Deb, David and Brendan on their roles.

Best,
Gordon