The Wall Street Journal

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Wall Street Journal began on the 8th of July 1889 as a four-page sheet measuring about 20 by 15 inches, sold for two cents a copy. Its very first issue carried a raw wire report on a boxing match between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain, stitched together from conflicting accounts. The paper's earliest writing was so dry that one historian called it a tedious, blow-by-blow account of the day's business without benefit of editing. From that cramped, jargon-filled origin grew an American newspaper based in Midtown Manhattan that now counts millions of subscribers and has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes. How did a daily summary once hand-delivered to traders become one of the nation's newspapers of record? What turned a sheet of stock listings into a publication trusted across the political spectrum, yet fought over by reporters and editorial writers under the same masthead? And how did its purchase by Rupert Murdoch test the wall between its newsroom and its owners?

• 2. From Flimsies To Front Page

  ›

  John J. Kiernan founded the Kiernan News Agency in 1869, and in 1880 he hired two reporters named Charles H. Dow and Edward D. Jones. On a recommendation from Collis Potter Huntington, Dow and Jones broke away with a third Kiernan reporter, Charles Bergstresser, to start Dow Jones and Company. They worked from the basement of 15 Wall Street, next to the New York Stock Exchange Building. The firm's first products were brief news bulletins nicknamed flimsies, carried by hand to traders throughout the day. In 1883 these were gathered into a printed daily summary called the Customers' Afternoon Letter, priced at $1.50 per month against the $15 charged for the bulletin service. Dow Jones opened its own printing press at 71 Broadway in 1885. In 1896 the paper introduced two stock indices, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Dow Jones Railroad Average. The first morning edition followed on the 14th of November 1898, and by the late 1890s daily circulation reached 7,000. Charles Dow wrote the first Review and Outlook column on the 21st of April 1899, a front-page editorial that explained stock prices through human nature. That line of thinking would later be known as the Dow theory, and his essays from 1899 to 1902 were judged stock market classics.

• 3. The Barron Era

  ›

  Charles Dow, in the months before his death in 1902, arranged to sell Dow Jones and the Journal to Clarence W. Barron for $130,000. Barron had served as the paper's Boston correspondent since 1889. Because he faced financial trouble, his wife Jessie Waldron Barron made the $2,500 down payment, and Clarence would not own a single share until roughly ten years later. Thomas F. Woodlock edited the Journal from 1902 to 1905, a period when daily circulation climbed from 7,000 to 11,000. William Peter Hamilton became lead editorial writer in 1908 and produced what one historian called daily sermons in support of free-market capitalism. Barron and his predecessors were credited with creating an atmosphere of fearless, independent financial reporting, a rarity in early business journalism. In 1921 Barron's, described as the country's premier financial weekly, was founded. Circulation reached 18,750 by 1920 and touched 52,000 briefly in 1928. Barron died in 1928, the year before Black Tuesday and the crash that deepened the Great Depression. His descendants, the Bancroft family, would keep control of the company until 2007.

• 4. Kilgore's Revolution

  ›

  Bernard Kilgore joined the Journal copy desk in 1929 and became news editor by 1931. For the Pacific Coast Edition he wrote a column called Dear George, explaining obscure financial topics in plain language. It stood in sharp contrast to other articles whose jargon was incomprehensible even to the paper's own reporters. In 1934 he launched the front-page news digest What's News. Kilgore's writing reached the White House. President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly praised his work on pension payments for World War I veterans and on a Supreme Court decision over the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Yet the paper still struggled, with circulation stuck at 32,000 in 1940 and most issues only 12 to 14 pages long. Kilgore was named managing editor in 1941 and Dow Jones CEO in 1945. He described the goal plainly. A Journal story had to satisfy a sophisticated readership while staying clear enough not to discourage newcomers. Under his hand circulation grew nearly four-fold, from 32,000 in 1940 to 140,000 in 1949, helped by a new slogan promising that men who get ahead in business read the paper. By his death in 1967, circulation had passed one million.

• 5. A National Newspaper

  ›

  The Wall Street Journal launched a West Coast edition on the 21st of October 1929, the Pacific Coast Edition focused on California businesses. Its circulation never exceeded 3,000, and the Great Depression drove cancellations. A Southwest edition based in Dallas followed in May 1947, the same year the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize for William Henry Grimes's editorials. Warren H. Phillips became managing editor in 1957, promoted from Chicago bureau manager. A former socialist who shifted toward social liberalism and fiscal conservatism, he pushed in-depth coverage of the civil rights movement on the grounds that it was something the average businessman needed to know about. Its reporting on the Little Rock Central High School crisis depicted local citizens as supportive of integration, in contrast to Governor Orval Faubus. During the 1962-1963 New York City newspaper strike, the Journal was the only daily to keep printing in the city. After the strike, Kilgore moved the presses from New York to Chicopee, Massachusetts, effective the 1st of July 1963, a move later attributed to feuds with the printer's union. In 1970 Dow Jones bought the Ottaway newspaper chain, then nine dailies and three Sunday papers, later renamed Dow Jones Local Media Group.

• 6. Murdoch Buys The Journal

  ›

  On the 2nd of May 2007, News Corporation made an unsolicited bid for Dow Jones, offering $60 per share for stock that had traded at $36.33. The Bancroft family, holding more than 60 percent of the voting stock, rejected the offer at first, then reconsidered. A definitive merger agreement followed on the 1st of August 2007. The roughly $5 billion sale added the Journal to Rupert Murdoch's holdings, which already included Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, London's The Times, and the New York Post. Shareholders approved the deal on the 13th of December 2007. Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz wrote that the Bancrofts and News Corporation had agreed the news and opinion sections would keep their editorial independence. That promise drew immediate doubt. A 2007 article quoted charges that Murdoch had made and broken similar pledges before. Former Times assistant editor Fred Emery recalled Murdoch saying, in March 1982, that he was considering firing Times editor Harold Evans. When Emery reminded him of his promise that editors could not be fired without independent directors' approval, Murdoch answered, God, you don't take all that seriously, do you? Murdoch eventually forced out Evans. A special committee meant to guard the Journal's integrity later said News Corporation violated its agreement when managing editor Marcus Brauchli resigned on the 22nd of April 2008 without timely notice. In 2013, the Journal and Dow Jones were spun off into the new News Corp.

• 7. Two Papers In One

  ›

  The Journal's editorial pages run separately from its news pages and carry a conservative bent, highly influential in establishment conservative circles. The paper has not endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928. Under editor Robert L. Bartley in the 1980s, the editorial page became the leading voice for supply-side economics, expounding on the Laffer curve and arguing that lower marginal and capital gains taxes could raise overall revenue. The gap between the two halves of the paper has drawn comment for decades. One reporter wrote in 1982 that Journal editorial writers put forth views that often contradict the paper's best reporting and news analysis. In July 2020, more than 280 Journal journalists and Dow Jones staff wrote to publisher Almar Latour criticizing the opinion pages for a lack of fact-checking and an apparent disregard for evidence. The editorial board replied that it would not wilt under cancel-culture pressure. The science coverage drew its own scrutiny. The editorial pages were described in 2011 as a forum for climate change denial, and a study that year found the Journal alone among major American print media in adopting a false balance that overplayed uncertainty in climate science. The Partnership for Responsible Growth reported in 2016 that none of the 201 climate editorials published since 1997 conceded that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of climate change. Even so, an October 2018 Simmons Research survey ranked the Journal the most trusted news organization among Americans, a result one observer credited to its mix of respected news pages and conservative editorials.

• 8. The Stories That Made It

  ›

  On the 7th of August 1973, reporter Jerry Landauer broke the news that Vice President Spiro Agnew was under federal investigation for bribery, extortion, and tax fraud. Agnew confirmed the inquiry the night before the article ran. After pleading no contest to one count of income tax evasion, he was sentenced to a $10,000 fine and a three-year suspended jail term, and resigned on the 10th of October 1973. David Rogers revealed on the 6th of April 1984 that the Central Intelligence Agency had placed acoustic mines in Nicaraguan harbors, sparking an international outcry. Senator Barry Goldwater condemned the lack of disclosure in a stern letter to CIA director William J. Casey, and the Senate passed a resolution against the mining by an 84-12 margin. Earlier, in 1939, Vermont C. Royster wrote a series on World War I battleships; when the Navy accused him of using classified information, he said he had drawn it from Encyclopedia Britannica. The paper's reach extended into the modern era of corporate scandal. Jonathan Weil first broke the story of financial abuses at Enron in September 2000, and in 2015 John Carreyrou alleged that the blood-testing company Theranos relied on faulty technology while founder Elizabeth Holmes misled investors. Murdoch, a major investor in Theranos and owner of the Journal, lost roughly $100 million on it. On the 11th of September 2001, the paper's headquarters at One World Financial Center was severely damaged; editors relocated to a colleague's home and to the South Brunswick campus, put out a scaled-down issue the next day, and won a 2002 Pulitzer for that coverage. During that investigation, terrorists kidnapped and killed Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.