It's Quittin' Time at 'The Wall Street Journal'

Good newspaper jobs are hard to come by these days, but you wouldn't know it from the way people are ditching the ones they have at The Wall Street Journal -- and, in some cases, leaving behind journalism altogether.

In recent days, columnist Jonathan Clements, reporter Laurie P. Cohen and editor Paul Barrett have all resigned from the paper. They follow reporters Anita Raghavan, who jumped to Forbes as European bureau chief, and Sally Beatty, who has joined Pfizer's PR department. A Dow Jones spokesman declined to comment on the exits.

Clements appears to be the biggest loss. His personal finance column, "Getting Going," is syndicated in 70 newspapers, and routinely makes the Journal's list of most emailed stories.

On April 14, he'll join Citigroup as director of financial education for a new unit created to advise the "emerging affluent," investors with less than $500,000 in assets. His duties will involve creating content aimed at those investors, including blogs, columns and videos. Even though it could be construed as a form of marketing, he sees the task as very much in line with what he's been doing at the Journal: "I have no intention of sacrificing the principles I've spent the last two decades advocating, and Citigroup hasn't asked me to do so," he says.

Clements adds that Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the Journal had very little effect on him personally and wasn't a factor in his decision to leave. "I'm 45 and it's time for a change," he says. "I recently wrote my thousandth column, and if somebody told me I had to write another thousand, I'd go out back and blow my brains out."

Meanwhile, Cohen (who briefly worked at Portfolio) left to join a hedge fund, according to sources, while Barrett returned to BusinessWeek after what was only a three-month stint at the Journal. Reuters media reporter Robert MacMillan also had a blink-and-you-missed-it Journal tenure recently, and now he's back at his old home, covering the paper where he worked a few weeks ago (with nary a word of disclosure, surprisingly).