Media People

Raju Narisetti is leaving The Washington Post for the Wall Street Journal.

He starts at the WSJ Feb. 15 as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network (wsj.com, SmartMoney.com and MarketWatch) and deputy managing editor of the Journal. He succeeds Kevin Delaney, who departed the WSJ yesterday for a job managing The Atlantic’s soon-to-launch business brand.

According to Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Narisetti’s tenure was marked by his “provid[ing] much of the vision and strategy that enabled The Post to become one of the most innovative and successful digital-news operations anywhere.”

Narisetti joined the Post in 2008. His last day will be Feb. 1.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

The Associated Press has opened a bureau in Pyongyang, North Korea, becoming the first international news organization to have a full-time presence in the country.

The office is located inside “the headquarters of the state-run Korean Central News Agency in downtown Pyongyang,” the AP says.

The bureau is staffed by two natives, reporter Pak Won Il and photographer Kim Kwang Hyon, who reported for AP in recent weeks on Kim Jong Il’s funeral. Supervising Pak and Kim will be Korea Bureau Chief Jean H. Lee and Chief Asia Photographer David Guttenfelder, who will apparently not be based in Pyongyang but will “make frequent trips to … manage the office, train the local journalists and conduct their own reporting.”

At a ceremony yesterday officially opening the bureau, AP president and CEO Tom Curley said: “Everyone at The Associated Press takes his or her responsibilities of a free and fair press with utmost seriousness. We pledge to do our best to reflect accurately the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as well as what they do and say.”

This will be interesting, to say the least.

Five hires at Bloomberg View, the financial news org’s opinion and editorial arm, Talking Biz News reports.

Those five hires are:

• Katy Roberts, previously Week In Review editor at the New York Times
• James Gibney, former features editor at The Atlantic
• Michael Newman, former politics editor at Slate
• Deborah Solomon, former economic policy reporter from The Wall Street Journal
• Marc Champion, also formerly of the WSJ (as Istanbul bureau chief)

.

All five will be members of the editorial board, which means they will “write and review editorials and columns and commission op-ed articles for the overall section.”

Awesome “as told to” in the January issue of the Washingtonian about how Dave Statter, a traffic reporter, became a news reporter first for radio station WTOP and then TV station WUSA, both in Washington DC.

Statter had just been let go from his traffic reporting job and was holed up in his condo. He was listening to the police scanner, a holdout from his days as a firefighter, when he heard about a plane crash.

This crash turned out to be Air Florida Flight 90, which had crashed into DC’s 14th Street Bridge on takeoff.

Statter says: “I called the WTOP newsroom and said, ‘Look, you don’t know me, but there’s been a plane crash at the 14th Street Bridge.’”

He was able to talk his way into a nearby hotel:

I was just walking up the hallway and there was a door open and I knocked on it. I looked in and they were all outside on the balcony watching. I said, “I want to do a radio report. Can I use your phone and stand on the balcony?”

I stood in the freezing cold, with my binoculars in one hand and the phone in the other, and gave WTOP live reports. I’d done some radio when I was in college and worked as a disk jockey in southern Maryland, but I’d never been a reporter for a radio station in a major market. This was my audition.

I was too stunned to be nervous. I could not believe there was a commercial plane between the bridges, in the river. I could see the helicopter swooping down, and I tried to make out what was going on with the rescues. I could see the damaged cars on the bridge. I just started talking, describing what I saw.

The next day, they said they needed an extra traffic reporter. “I walked in, got a tape recorder and car, and they said, ‘Here’s the keys. We’ll fill out the paperwork later.’ By Friday they said, ‘Would you like a full-time job?’”

Bill Harris, who worked at Flint, Mich.’s WJRT-12 for 34 years, is done with them, he told Mlive.

After his contract was not renewed in April, he was asked to come back to the station to work on some special projects. Those projects are now over, and he confirms to Mlive that “the marriage wasn’t perfect,” so he’s done.

“My vision for what I want to do … didn’t mesh with (the work at) ABC12,” he said.

He has had ongoing conversations with rival stations WNEM-5 (CBS) and WEYI-25 (NBC) since summer, and may join one of them as soon as January.

Harris is a four-time Emmy winner and a viewer favorite if this Facebook post is anything to go by.

Modern technology is great. It’s allowing cartoonist David Horsey, recently hired by the Los Angeles Times, to remain in Seattle, SeattleWeekly reports.

His new gig, which begins Jan 1: “recrafting” the newspaper’s Top of the Ticket political blog, with “some combination every day of words and pictures.”

Since Top of the Ticket covers national politics, it apparently isn’t strictly necessary for Horsey to be in town.

He did offer to relocate, though. After his bosses said he could stay in Seattle, he responded: “how about in the winter months then?”

See, it’s funny because it’s rainy in Seattle.

But hey, as the Weekly puts it, this is kind of a dream job. Interesting work and you don’t have to move. Cool.

We’ve posted in the past when a bit of correspondence from gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is revealed (like this letter he sent when applying for a job at the Vancouver Sun), but why should HST get all the coverage?

Kurt Vonnegut, for example, did a brief stint at Sports Illustrated when the magazine was first launching.

His downfall came when asked to write a story about a race horse that had jumped over a rail and escaped.

According to VonnegutWeb, Vonnegut stared at his desk for hours. Finally, he left the building.

Read more

Reader Joe Donatelli needs a job. He was laid off from his job at Break Media in LA in August, and since then, has been underemployed (“walking his dog 15 times a day,” in his words) since.

He sent us a note saying that he’s begun including a new link in every cover letter he sends, which is titled “A Note To Any Company Considering Hiring Joe Donatelli.”

It includes plenty of reasons why he should be hired, which include:

• He’s very good
  OK, it should probably go without saying that he’s very good, but it sounds like bragging in a cover letter to say “I’m very good.” Your company probably has hired very bad employees in the past. Joe would not be one of those, because, as we’ve stated here, and forgive us for beating a dead horse, he’s very good.
• He will not steal from your company
  Pens, copy machines, profits — you name it. Joe Donatelli will not steal from your company. This is something he likes to call The Joe Donatelli Promise. If something is stolen while Joe is employed at your company, your best bet will be to start questioning any employee who has not made The Joe Donatelli Promise.

Onward til his promise to play on the company softball team (which was a big plus at a newspaper we used to work for), promising not to exceed the Secret Santa limit and make everyone else bad, and pledging to buy Girl Scout cookies from his coworkers’ daughters. (“Joe will buy the Thin Mints, which he immediately refrigerates.”)

“Will it get me anywhere? I don’t know,” he tells us. “Was it fun to write? Yes, it was. Is every word of it true? Indeed.”

Considering that Donatelli’s background includes humor writing and that his last job was at the largest online humor site, we think this was a pretty clever approach. Best of luck to you, Joe.

The Atlantic has launched a new channel, The Atlantic Health, which promises a “broad approach” that will “bring[...] you vital news and analysis that matters to your health and wellbeing.”

The channel will be edited by Nicholas Jackson, formerly a writer in the tech channel.

The channel promises to be lively, and Jackson and the site’s writers will have their work cut out for them. In Jackson’s introductory post, the commenters are already coming out to play. There are the people who think the reporting is already not rigorous enough (“I hope this column is intended to add to the debate rather than parrot the usual undigested tripe”) and then those who believe mainstream medicine is out to get them (“I myself, for example, have made the decision after have several major problems with the quality of health care, to begin the process of being my own doctor”).

Good luck, Atlantic! You stepped into probably the most controversial topic after politics!

T’will be the night before the night before Christmas, and it’ll be on to something new for LA Times editor Russ Stanton, who’s stepping down at the paper effective Dec. 23.

He’ll be replaced by managing editor Davan Maharaj, reports FishbowlLA.

Maharaj will be the fifth top editor the paper has seen in seven years. He’s been with the paper since 1989 and for the past three years has worked “with Stanton to help transform The Times newsroom into a fully-staffed, 24-hour operation, delivering news across multiple platforms including digital, mobile, video and print,” the company said in a release.