Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Wall Street Journal published its first issue on the 8th of July 1889. The debut edition was four pages long, measured about 20 by 15 inches, and cost two cents a copy. It grew out of an earlier daily summary called the Customers' Afternoon Letter.
Charles H. Dow, Edward D. Jones, and Charles Bergstresser co-founded Dow Jones and Company, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. All three had worked as reporters at the Kiernan News Agency, and they set up shop in the basement of 15 Wall Street.
As of 2025, The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by print circulation, with 412,000 print subscribers. It also has 4.13 million digital subscribers, the second-most in the nation after The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes. Its first came in 1947 for William Henry Grimes's editorials, and it later won a 2002 Pulitzer for its coverage of the September 11 attacks and a 2019 Pulitzer for reporting on the Stormy Daniels payment.
The Wall Street Journal is published by Dow Jones and Company, a division of News Corp. News Corporation acquired Dow Jones in a roughly $5 billion deal completed in 2007, bringing the paper into Rupert Murdoch's holdings, and the company was spun off into the new News Corp in 2013.
The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages carry a conservative bent and are influential in establishment conservative circles, while its news pages are described as more centrist. The paper has not endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928, and under editor Robert L. Bartley its editorial page became the leading voice for supply-side economics in the 1980s.
The Wall Street Journal broke the 1973 federal investigation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, revealed the CIA mining of Nicaraguan harbors in 1984, and first reported financial abuses at Enron in 2000. It later exposed faulty technology at Theranos in 2015 and reported the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels in 2018.