Your new Globe DC bureau chief: Chris Rowland

At the end of May, Globe metro editor Brian McGrory told his staff that metro political editor Chris Rowland was leaving to take an editing job in Bloomberg's Boston office. But now it turns out that Roland--who's been replaced as metro political editor by Scott Helman--won't be leaving the Globe after all; instead, he's going to Washington to fill the DC bureau chief position recently vacated by Peter Canellos.

Here's the note sent by Globe editor Marty Baron earlier today.

To all:

Last Thursday, we raised our glasses at the Blarney Stone to toast Chris Rowland and wish him well as he prepared to leave the Globe. Today, let’s raise a glass again – much higher (and right here in our own newsroom) – because Chris is staying with the Globe after all.

He’s taking on a very important new assignment.

Chris will become our Washington bureau chief, succeeding Peter Canellos, who last week was named editor of the editorial page.

This is a perfect job for Chris, and Chris is a perfect fit for the job. Over the past two years, he has been Metro political editor, directing a team of six Massachusetts State House and Boston City Hall reporters who have produced some of our most high-impact stories. Today, as you know, a former Speaker of the House is under indictment because of an investigation by the Globe into influence-peddling. Today, too, the Legislature is finally addressing abuses of the public pension system because of Globe stories that documented one outrage after the next.

Chris, 47, brings to this post of Assistant Managing Editor/Washington an impressive range and depth of experience. He was a State House reporter for The Providence Journal, where over four years he covered national, state, and local politics, including the presidential primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina in 2000, the parties’ nominating conventions, and several congressional and gubernatorial races.

Chris, a native of New Haven, Conn., has an intimate knowledge of New England and the Boston metro area – as well as strong ties to many of the newsroom’s biggest departments.

Early in his career, after graduating in 1985 from the University of Arizona with a journalism degree and reporting a year for the Associated Press in Denver, Chris moved to Vermont to cover politics and nuclear power for The Brattleboro Reformer. While at the ProJo, prior to his State House job, he covered Rhode Island cities and towns. (His Rhode Island knowledge and connections were a big plus for us in 2003 when he played a leading role in our coverage of the Station nightclub fire, which killed 100 people. That work won the ASNE’s Jesse Laventhol Prize for Deadline Reporting by a Team). Chris was the ProJo’s Newport bureau chief for two years, supervising several reporters and covering the U.S. Navy, marine issues, and the coastal environment.

Chris started at The Boston Globe in 2001 as our Globe West bureau chief, and in short order he was snapped up by the Business section. From 2003 to 2007, he covered Boston’s academic medical centers, physicians, and companies in the fields of insurance, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. He became expert in Medicare, Medicaid, and the intricacies of the medical-industrial complex. His work in that area was a major part of a Globe series in 2004 that documented GOP domination of the legislative process in Congress, a reporting effort that was recognized with a special project award by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Chris, as you can see, has immersed himself in many of the key issues that are central to the mission of our Washington bureau and our entire newsroom. Wherever he has worked at the Globe, he has excelled.

Please join me in thanking Chris for remaining at the Globe and congratulating him on his new assignment.

Marty