WSJ/Dow Jones names joint bureau chiefs for France and Italy

Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson sent out the following announcement to the staff on Thursday afternoon:

We are delighted to announce that  Grainne McCarthy will become joint bureau chief for France and Alessandra Galloni will be joint bureau chief for Italy, expanding the international roster of shared Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones Newswires offices. In their new positions, Grainne and Alessandra will report jointly to Gren Manuel, Newswires senior editor for EMEA, and Rebecca Blumenstein, Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Grainne will supervise WSJ and Newswires reporters and editors, including the French-Language Service, from Paris. She is already well acquainted with joint news management roles, having served as Chief Global Markets Editor for WSJ.com and DJN from late 2009. Since joining Newswires in 1996 as a reporter in Brussels, she has served as Indonesia bureau chief, assistant managing editor for Americas money news and managing editor for Americas energy news.

She has a master’s degree in journalism from Dublin City University and a bachelor’s degree in European Studies from the University of Limerick. She completed a one-year Knight-Bagehot fellowship at Columbia University in 2001 and won a William R. Clabby Dow Jones Newswires Award for her coverage of Indonesia in 1999.

Alessandra, based in Rome, will oversee Newswires and WSJ reporters in Milan and Rome, including Newswires’ Italian-language joint-venture news service with Milano Finanza, a national business newspaper. Ale served for the past five years in Paris as WSJ’s Southern Europe bureau chief, where she ran the Journal’s coverage of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. She will take advantage of her contacts around the region by continuing to write about European issues.

Ale joined the Journal’s London bureau in 2001 as a reporter covering advertising. She moved to Rome in 2002, where she reported on the colorful world of Italian business and the even more colorful world of Italian politics, and European luxury goods. She led the paper’s coverage of the Parmalat corporate scandal, which received an Overseas Press Club award in 2004, and won a Business Journalist of the Year award in the U.K. in 2005. Ale has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.

The moves mark the conclusion of Art Mooradian’s long European sojourn for Newswires, as he will return to the U.S. in a management role in New York. Art has worked in Europe since 1982, having been the wires’ first European energy reporter, then bureau chief in the Netherlands, Germany and most recently in France, with responsibility for Benelux and southern Europe. He also served for several years in London as Newswires’ EMEA training editor and operations editor. Art has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the American University in Washington.

Please join us in wishing all three the best of luck with their important new assignments.