Dow Jones vice president Ingrassia plans to resign

By Robert MacMillan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dow Jones & Co Inc DJ.N Vice President Paul Ingrassia said on Monday he plans to quit, making him the first top executive to leave since News Corp NWSa.N said it would buy The Wall Street Journal publisher.

"I will be leaving probably after the first of the year," Ingrassia said in a brief phone interview. "There just didn't seem to be an appropriate place for me in the company."

He also said he did not see "any role that really excited me" at Dow Jones.

Ingrassia, 57, said the decision was unrelated to Dow Jones's agreement to sell itself to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. He would not say what he plans to do after leaving.

He had been a frontrunner to be the next managing editor of the Journal, the paper's top editorial job, after Paul Steiger said he would retire. The role instead went in May to Marcus Brauchli, then a deputy managing editor.

Ingrassia has served as vice president for news strategy since July 2006, responsible for examining issues created by the increased role the Internet plays in journalism and coordinating coverage at Dow Jones news outlets, according to a biography supplied by the company.

Dow Jones also owns the Barron's investor's weekly, Dow Jones Newswires, financial news Web site MarketWatch.com and Asian and European editions of the Journal.

Ingrassia joined Dow Jones in 1977 as a reporter in the Journal's Chicago bureau, and served as chief in various bureaus. He won a Pulitzer Prize and a Loeb Award in 1993 with Detroit bureau colleague Joseph White for their coverage of the corporate governance upheaval at General Motors.

Ingrassia also served as an assistant vice president at the company's former Telerate financial information business, widely viewed as a financial flop for Dow Jones.

In 1998, he was named president of Dow Jones Newswires.

His brother, Larry Ingrassia, edits the business section of The New York Times.

Reuters Group Plc RTR.L competes with Dow Jones in providing news.