The Wall Street Journal (also known as The Journal)

7 min readJan 14, 2021

The Wall Street Journal (also known as The Journal) is an American business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese.[2] The Journal, along with its Asian editions, is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp. The newspaper is published in the broadsheet format and online. The Journal has been printed continuously, since its inception on July 8, 1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser.[3]

The Wall Street Journal is one of the largest newspapers in the United States by circulation, with a circulation of about 2.834 million copies (including nearly 1,829,000 digital sales) as of August 2019,[1] compared with USA Today’s 1.7 million. The Journal publishes the luxury news and lifestyle magazine WSJ, which was originally launched as a quarterly but expanded to 12 issues in 2014. An online version was launched in 1996, which has been accessible only to subscribers since it began.[4]

The newspaper has won 37 Pulitzer Prizes (as of 2019).[5][6] The editorial pages of the Journal are typically conservative in their position.[7][8][9] The Journal editorial board has promoted views that differ from the scientific consensus on climate change, acid rain, and ozone depletion, as well as on the health harms of second-hand smoke, pesticides and asbestos.[10] It is regarded as a “newspaper of record”, particularly in terms of business and financial news.[11][12][13]

History[edit]

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Beginnings[edit]

Front page of the first issue of The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 1889

The first products of Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of the Journal, were brief news bulletins, nicknamed “flimsies”, hand-delivered throughout the day to traders at the stock exchange in the early 1880s. They were later aggregated in a printed daily summary called the Customers’ Afternoon Letter. Reporters Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser converted this into The Wall Street Journal, which was published for the first time on July 8, 1889, and began delivery of the Dow Jones & Company News Service via telegraph.[14]

In 1896, The “Dow Jones Industrial Average” was officially launched. It was the first of several indices of stock and bond prices on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1899, the Journal’s Review & Outlook column, which still runs today, appeared for the first time, initially written by Charles Dow.

Journalist Clarence Barron purchased control of the company for US$130,000 in 1902; circulation was then around 7,000 but climbed to 50,000 by the end of the 1920s. Barron and his predecessors were credited with creating an atmosphere of fearless, independent financial reporting — a novelty in the early days of business journalism. In 1921, Barron’s, the United States’s premier financial weekly, was founded.[15] Barron died in 1928, a year before Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that greatly affected the Great Depression in the United States. Barron’s descendants, the Bancroft family, would continue to control the company until 2007.[15]

The Journal took its modern shape and prominence in the 1940s, a time of industrial expansion for the United States and its financial institutions in New York. Bernard Kilgore was named managing editor of the paper in 1941, and company CEO in 1945, eventually compiling a 25-year career as the head of the Journal. Kilgore was the architect of the paper’s iconic front-page design, with its “What’s News” digest, and its national distribution strategy, which brought the paper’s circulation from 33,000 in 1941 to 1.1 million when Kilgore died in 1967. Under Kilgore, in 1947, the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize for William Henry Grimes’s editorials.[15]

In 1967, Dow Jones Newswires began a major expansion outside of the United States ultimately placing its journalists in every major financial center in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, and Africa. In 1970, Dow Jones bought the Ottaway newspaper chain, which at the time comprised nine dailies and three Sunday newspapers. Later, the name was changed to Dow Jones Local Media Group.[16]

The period from 1971 to 1997 brought about a series of launches, acquisitions, and joint ventures, including “Factiva”, The Wall Street Journal Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, the WSJ.com website, Dow Jones Indexes, MarketWatch, and “WSJ Weekend Edition”. In 2007, News Corp. acquired Dow Jones. WSJ., a luxury lifestyle magazine, was launched in 2008.[17]

The Wall Street Journal (also known as The Journal)

Contents

History[edit]

Beginnings[edit]

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