WSJ promotes Farley to oversee feature live events

Mike Miller, WSJ deputy managing editor overseeing feature sections, sent out the following announcement on Tuesday:

I’m pleased to announce that Christopher John Farley, senior editorial director for features, will take on a new role overseeing live events in arts, culture, entertainment and style. Events are taking on new strategic importance for the WSJ as we broaden our coverage and expand the ways we connect with our subscribers. Chris will lead our efforts to build an ambitious and inviting calendar.

This assignment will draw on Chris’s track record, as editor of our Speakeasy blog for the last five years, as one of our newsroom’s most talented impresarios. Under Chris, Speakeasy grew to become our most popular blog and a lively home for dispatches from our staff and a vibrant range of outside contributors, from novelists to musicians to movie stars to poets. Chris’s WSJ Cafe series, in which musicians give live acoustic performances exclusively for our site, has drawn such luminaries as Adele, John Legend, Tony Bennett, and Ed Sheeran.

A former music critic and editor for Time Magazine, Chris joined the Journal as a writer and editor in 2005.  He is the is the author of three novels, “My Favorite War,” “Kingston by Starlight” and the children’s fantasy adventure “Game World,” and a number of nonfiction books including the national bestseller “Aaliyah: More than a Woman,” and the biography “Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley.” He co-wrote and co-edited the book “The Blues” (Harper Collins) the companion volume to Martin Scorsese’s PBS documentary series. Farley’s short fiction has been featured in a number of anthologies including “The Vintage Book of War Fiction,” a survey of the best war stories of the last 100 years, and “Kingston Noir,” a 2012 short story collection. Farley was a consulting producer of a coming documentary on soul singer James Brown that was directed by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney and screened at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Please join me in congratulating Chris on his new role.