The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau, it was widely reported yesterday. Journal managing editor Robert Thomson said in a memo to colleagues that "the economic background to the closure is painfully obvious to us all." He added that "an investigative function" would remain but that the core reporting team would be disbanded.

The nine reporters affected will be able to apply for openings elsewhere in the paper, Thomson said. The investigations group, several of who were part of a team awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for a series of articles about stock-option backdating, will remain in Boston. According to a WSJ article yesterday, the reporters in Boston tend to cover "mutual-fund firms, education and companies in industries including computer storage and software, retailing and biotechnology," but Boston is no longer home to many of the big companies formerly based there. Coverage will be shifted to the paper's New York headquarters where necessary.

Parent company Dow Jones will keep its Newswires bureau and Marketwatch team in place. Thomson portrayed the closure as an isolated move, saying that "there are no plans, nascent or otherwise, to close any other US or international bureau."

The Wall Street Journal seems to have been doing well compared to its fellow newspapers: it recently became the paper with the highest circulation in the US, according to the latest ABC figures, and as a specialist financial publication, it is one of the papers that successfully charges for its online content. However, this closure shows that the advertising downturn is taking its toll, even at the WSJ, which although it lost some staff, has not yet been forced to cut large numbers of jobs.

Source: Wall Street Journal, Paid Content