Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson issued the following staff memo about plans to expand the paper's global mergers and acquisitions efforts:

From: Thomson, Robert
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 6:36 PM
To: WSJ All News Staff; Newswires_USERS
Subject: The new global M&A team

Dear All,

We are absolutely delighted to announce an expanded global deals team that will build on the leadership that the Journal has crafted in a crucial area of reporting.

Gina Chon and Anupreeta Das will become our new senior M&A reporters in New York - a dynamic duo who will certainly dominate coverage in this high-profile area. Gina was most recently our reporter on the ground in Iraq and Anupreeta comes to us from Reuters, where she was the outstanding member of their M&A team and one of their brightest talents. The deals duet will add energy and talent to our already strong team, which is led by our Deputy Money & Investing editor, the excellent Dennis Berman, and our veteran London M&A reporter, Dana Cimilluca. To complete the global team, we are pleased to have Asia veteran Alison Tudor heading to Hong Kong. In other words, we have the world staked out.

Gina joined Money & Investing earlier this year following two years as the Journal's Baghdad correspondent. In Iraq, Gina produced a string of compelling stories under difficult conditions and emerged as one of the best sourced reporters in Baghdad, a necessary trait for an M&A reporter. She joined the Wall Street Journal in 2005 in Detroit, where she covered the auto industry, including the sale of Chrysler to Cerberus. Before that, she worked for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Iraq, where she trained Iraqi journalists. She also lived in Cambodia for two years and reported from Thailand, Burma, Vietnam and South Korea, where she had her first taste of M&A matters as Seoul Correspondent for the Daily Deal. Her book, Behind the Killing Fields, which she wrote with a Cambodian colleague, is due out this summer.

Anupreeta joins the Journal from Reuters, where she rapidly climbed the reporting ranks. She most recently covered M&A, focusing on technology, media and telecom deals. She broke news on Microsoft and Yahoo and Comcast, and General Electric and Vivendi, among many others. She has also covered technology and venture capital in San Francisco, and prior to joining Reuters, Anupreeta reported in her native India at two of the country's biggest publications, Outlook Magazine and The Indian Express.

The venerable Dennis is a veteran of the M&A beat, having covered deals from 2004 through early 2008. He broke some of the biggest stories of that era, including Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch, Mars' purchase of Wrigley, and the LBOs of HCA, Harrah's and Equity Office Properties. For the past three years, Dennis has written The Game column, highlighting the bright and the dark sides of Wall Street's personality.

Dana joined the Journal in 2007 as the lead blogger for Deal Journal. He moved to London in 2008 as our European M&A reporter. Since then he's broken stories including Roche's $47 billion purchase of Genentech, Heineken's acquisition of Femsa Cerveza and Coke's $12 billion deal with its largest bottler. Before joining the Journal, Dana was Bloomberg's M&A reporter in New York. Dana had a five-year stint in equity research at Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch.

Alison Tudor will land in Hong Kong next month as our Asian M&A and finance reporter. Alison moves over from the Journal's Tokyo bureau, where she's covered banking and finance for the past two years. She has broken news in running stories on AIG, Lehman and Citigroup's distressed sale of Japanese assets. She came to the Journal in 2008 from Reuters, where she covered private equity in Asia and led the international corporate finance team in Japan. Alison has worked as a financial correspondent in Tokyo, London, Paris, Milan and Rome. She will report to Hong Kong bureau chief Peter Stein.

There is no doubt that, under the guidance of Dennis, we have built a global team that is without peer. We wish them all the best in the pursuit of the deal,

Robert.