(Exclusive.) Earlier this month, Wall Street Journal staff crammed into Langan’s – the midtown media watering hole located conveniently across the street from their newsroom at 1211 Avenue of the Americas.

They were there to farewell Business, Finance and Economics Coverage Chief Marie Beaudette, who just a couple of weeks earlier had told Wall Street Journal EIC Emma Tucker that she was leaving for a gig at CNN. As Journal staffers knocked back pints of beer and swilled glasses of wine, the Journal's deputy editor, Charles Forelle, gave a toast to Beaudette. 

“As you may have heard,” he told around 70 of his colleagues. “We have a very close working relationship.” The crowd broke out in awkward laughter, according to three people in attendance. One person who was not laughing was Tucker, who was in London at the time of the shindig where the remarks were soon relayed to her. 

Just two days after the party, The Journal published a story that raised eyebrows internally, headlined: ‘Sex Scandals. Accounting Fraud. It’s All Showing Up on the Corporate Hotline.’

The story centres around global food producer Nestlé and its workplace whistleblower hotline. One call this year led to the downfall of Nestlé CEO Laurent Freixe after a report to the line that Freixe was in a relationship with a Nestlé marketing executive. Some WSJ staffers couldn’t help but make comparisons to the Forelle/Beaudette fiasco.  

In January, Beaudette and Forelle attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, representing The Wall Street Journal and its Journal House. Multiple WSJ staffers recounted to Breaker that the pair seemed “extremely close” during the multi-day event. “They were just always together,” one person who was there from the Journal told Breaker. That followed Beaudette receiving a promotion that had been lobbied for extensively by Forelle, and a trip to the San Francisco bureau together, where they oversaw a number of layoffs.

“I wish I’d known it was this easy to get ahead at 23 when I was writing five stories a day for the Dow Jones wire service,” Beaudette previously told Breaker. “The fact is, I’ve worked really hard to get where I am, and any suggestion otherwise is patently false. I’m leaving the Journal, which I love dearly, because I decided it’s time, and I’m ready for a new challenge.”

But now that “very close working relationship,” as first reported by Breaker, is set to see Forelle imminently depart the Wall Street Journal, where he once held ambitions to edit the paper, two people familiar with the situation tell Breaker. (Puck’s Dylan Byers first reported the development). 

Forelle declined to comment, but we have learned that he has had informal talks with Ben Smith at Semafor about joining their newsroom. Seamfor is currently advertising for a deputy editor. 

That leaves Tucker with two big jobs to fill: Beaudette’s position has already been advertised (with the eye-watering salary of $285,000-$335,000), and, Breaker has learned, there is some jockeying already internally for the job. 

Meantime, one person set to be elevated owing to Forelle and Beaudette’s departures is…