The Post's New Executive Editor Once Headed Wall Street Journal

Paul Steiger, Brauchli's predecessor as the Journal's editor, praised his wide range of experience, "having done everything from very heavy financial and economic and market stories to the most swashbuckling, banana republic foreign correspondence. He relates well to people, and he learns fast."

John Harwood, a former Journal reporter now with CNBC, said Brauchli "is incredibly bright and able and someone who has a real sense of what the right news agenda ought to be." But citing Brauchli's lack of experience in the nation's capital, he added, "I'm sure people will be watching to see how quickly he gets the political story, the Washington story, both nationally and locally."

Some Journal insiders say Brauchli seemed increasingly unhappy working for Murdoch. "A lot of people thought being managing editor of the Journal meant running your own show, and it didn't," said Alan Murray, the paper's deputy managing editor. But he said working on the Web site under Brauchli was "delightful and empowering. He had a willingness to let me take the ball and run with it."

In accepting the job, Brauchli is joining a newspaper whose circulation has been declining and which has just completed its third round of early-retirement buyouts in five years but is also experiencing tremendous growth online. While the daily circulation is 673,000, the number of unique monthly visitors to washingtonpost.com is 9.4 million. On the journalistic front, the paper won six Pulitzer Prizes in April.

Shortly after Brauchli resigned from the Journal, Graham called Steiger to inquire about him. Weymouth then called Brauchli, saying she was seeking advice from a wide range of people about The Post's future, and they met at the Off the Record bar at the Hay-Adams hotel. After he had a series of further meetings with Weymouth, Downie and other Post executives, Weymouth called him in New York and offered him the job.

A veteran foreign correspondent who reported from 20 countries in 15 years, Brauchli spent most of his career at Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company.

While growing up in Boulder, Colo., where his father was a lawyer and his mother a community activist, Brauchli gravitated toward writing at a young age. He worked on his junior high and high school newspapers and also freelanced and took pictures for the Boulder Daily Camera. He did the same at Columbia University, working at the student paper, as a stringer for the Associated Press and as a copy boy for the New York Times, where he did legwork for local reporters.

Brauchli took a year off from college to work at the Denver Post and as a weekend producer for the city's NBC affiliate before graduating from Columbia in 1983, in the same class as future U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, although their paths did not cross.

The following year, Brauchli became a copy editor for Dow Jones Newswires, and within months he was dispatched to Hong Kong, where, among other things, he covered the fall of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. For a decade and a half, other than a year at Harvard for a Nieman journalism fellowship, Brauchli moved from one Journal posting to the next: Stockholm, Tokyo, Shanghai. He covered the inflating of Japan's financial bubble and its subsequent collapse.

Returning to New York in 1999 as national news editor, Brauchli quickly rose through the management ranks. He became global news editor in 2003 and deputy managing editor in 2005 before edging out a more experienced rival to succeed Steiger last year.

Brauchli was offered that job one day after Murdoch's News Corp. made a $5 billion bid to buy Dow Jones from its longtime owners, the Bancroft family. As part of the eventual deal, Murdoch agreed that he would retain Brauchli and two other top editors and that an independent committee would have to approve any hiring or firing for those positions.

But after Murdoch took control in December, Brauchli found himself being undercut by the new publisher, Robert Thomson, the former editor of Murdoch's Times of London. Brauchli was caught between Murdoch's push for rapid change -- which included a newsier front page, shorter stories and more coverage of national politics -- and much of the staff, which wanted to preserve the Journal's traditional role as a business newspaper specializing in long narratives. Brauchli became a middleman, trying to accommodate the new owner's demands while, for example, protecting the quirky front-page features known as A-heds, which Murdoch had criticized.