WSJ’s “Heard on the Street” adds two in London

Simon Nixon, the European editor of “Heard on The Street” in The Wall Street Journal, sent out the following staff announcement Tuesday:

I am delighted to announce two new additions to the Heard on the Street team in Europe. Helen Thomas will join us from the Financial Times as deputy European editor of Heard on the Street. John Jannarone re-joins the Heard team as a reporter after a stint on the WSJ’s media team in New York. Both Helen and John will be based in London.

Helen is an outstanding journalist who was most recently the FT’s mining correspondent where she was responsible for a string of scoops relating to the renegotiation of Glencore’s bid for Xstrata and the scandal surrounding Bumi Plc. Before that she was the FT’s New York-based mergers and acquisitions correspondent, a writer on the Lex column an on the Alphaville blog. Helen began her career at JP Morgan. She has a first class degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University.

John was one of the original members of the Heard team when it was re-launched in its current form in 2008.  He established himself as one of the Journal’s star reporters with, among other coups, his 2011 Heard column exposing accounting irregularities at Diamond Foods, which triggered a 70% fall in the U.S. food company’s stock price, the collapse of a planned $2.4 billion takeover of Pringles and the resignation of the CEO. John joined Dow Jones Newswires in 2006 in Singapore where he was deputy bureau chief and moved to New York in 2008. He began his career as an analyst at Morgan Stanley and also worked as a trader for a Dallas-based hedge fund. He studied at Princeton University where he graduated cum laude in economics.

Please join me in wishing Helen and John success in their new roles.