Marcus Walker Brauchli, who became managing editor of The Wall Street Journal on May 15, 2007, grew up in the mostly liberal college town of Boulder, Colorado, and is the son of a Boulder attorney who is known nationally as a liberal blogger and columnist.

Brauchli, who goes by Marcus (not Marc) and whose name is pronounced just like the cruciferous vegetable, assumes the helm of a paper whose editorial page is a bastion of American conservative thought – but whose newsroom is more politically heterogeneous.

The day after Brauchli was named to succeed current WSJ Managing Editor, Paul E. Steiger, Brauchli’s appointment was celebrated by the politics and current events blog, Spot-on.com, for which Marcus’ father, Christopher R. Brauchli, is a regular contributor.

“They’ve got the apple but we’ve got the tree,” beamed journalist Chris Nolan, who founded Spot-on.com (then called “Politics from Left to Right”) in 2003.

Marcus’s father, Christopher, earned his law degree at the University of Colorado after graduating from Harvard University.  The elder Brauchli is a former President of the Colorado Bar Association and founder of its Lend-a-Lawyer program, which provides legal services to what it terms the “less fortunate members of society.”

Both Christopher R. Brauchli and Marcus’s mother, Margot, are listed by the ACLU Foundation of Colorado as “Protectors of the Bill of Rights” donors -- $501 to $1,000 – in the foundation’s 2003-2004 annual report.

Margot Brauchli is also listed as a donor to various Colorado Democratic candidates as well as the Democratic National Committee by the website, newsmeat.com.

Margot has been a lifetime supporter of the arts in Boulder, and according to the Daily Camera is a co-founder of the Boulder Bach Festival and Jarrow Montesori.

Margot is the granddaughter of Col. Joseph Harvey Long, a founder of The (West Virginia) Herald-Dispatch.  She is the youngest child of Paul Walker Long, the son of Col. Long.

In April 2003, Marcus and his family visited Huntington, West Virginia, to learn more about their journalistic legacy.  “All these years, I’ve been reading all these biographies, and it occurred to me I didn’t know enough about my own family history,” Marcus told the local newspaper.