WSJ to close Jakarta bureau, will restructure SE Asia

Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray sent out the following announcement on Monday:

All,

We are reorganizing our Southeast Asia operations to improve coverage of a vital region and better tailor our resources to our evolving needs. This will involve two steps.

The first is to build a real-time team focused on serving the breaking-news needs of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. This Singapore hub will be bolstered by the relocation of staff and headcount from around Asia and will be modeled on the dedicated real-time operations that have proven so successful in Barcelona and New York.

The second is the creation of a team to concentrate on in-depth news coverage, analysis and strong enterprise work for the Journal. We will expect these reporters to provide the broad, smart coverage of business, finance, the economy and major news developments that so distinguished our work on events like the Rohingya crisis and the Thai cave rescue.

Both teams will be based in Singapore, where we have made significant investments to create a new, modern newsroom. Centralizing the teams will drastically reduce our administrative burden in the region, freeing up resources up to focus on journalism.

These changes will involve some difficult choices. We will be closing our Jakarta bureau. We also will be asking other people around the region to relocate. We don’t take such decisions lightly. They will be hard, but the end result should be a well-staffed, focused operation better able to respond to news wherever it arises.

We will be posting the new jobs today, and we will announce the leadership and staffing of these operations in due course. Existing staff are encouraged to apply. The jobs also will be open to other candidates inside and outside the company.

Matt