WSJ's Atlanta bureau chief named senior national correspondent

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson sent out the following e-mail announcement to the paper’s staff on Monday:

“I’m pleased to announce that Doug Blackmon has been named Senior National Correspondent, a new role in which he will focus on developing a wide range of U.S. news stories, economic and political, and coverage of the 2010 midterm elections. This is an important position for the contemporary Journal as we seek to increase the depth of our National News reporting, which has become pre-eminent among those newspapers which regard themselves as national.

“As Atlanta bureau chief, Doug has shown leadership on big general-news stories in the past, notably the Hurricane Katrina coverage, which received a special National Headliner award, and the swine flu coverage this year. His new role will allow him to stretch his skills across the paper, identifying emerging themes and expertly writing textured stories, some of which will be extremely long.

“Doug has been the Atlanta bureau chief since 2004, and was deputy bureau chief in Atlanta for three years prior to that. He joined the Journal in 1995 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where his reporting on municipal corruption in the 1990s helped lead to the conviction and imprisonment of eight city officials. This past year he won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for his book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, which grew from a series of articles he wrote for the Journal.”