THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: THE BUSINESS NEWSPAPER

First number of the Wall Street Journal

The Grandma is a rich business woman. One of her favourite newspaper is The Wall Street Journal, a referent for her in business and investments. On a day like today, in 1889, the first issue of The Wall Street Journal was published. 

She has had the possibility of reading the first publication of this legendary newspaper before reviewing Chapters 6 and 7 of Intermediate Language Practice.

More information: Present Perfect

Press is an important element in a society as a tool to offer information and create opinion. Prestige is not available to a newspaper if it doesn't offer truthful information of quality which respects the sources and gives the possibility to help citizens to be critic and non-conformist.

The Wall Street Journal is a U.S. business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper based in New York City. The Journal, along with its Asian and European 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 Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation. According to News Corp, in its June 2017 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, The Journal had a circulation of about 2.277 million copies, including nearly 1,270,000 digital subscriptions, as of June 2017, compared with USA Today's 1.7 million.

The Wall Street Journal Headquarters

The newspaper, which has won 40 Pulitzer Prizes through 2017, derives its name from Wall Street in the heart of the Financial District of Lower Manhattan.  

The Journal has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8, 1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser. The Journal launched an online version in 1996, which has been accessible only to subscribers since it began.

The first products of Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of The Journal, were brief news bulletins, nick-named 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 News Service via telegraph.

More information: The Wall Street Journal Archive

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.

The WSJ in paper and on line

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, America's premier financial weekly, was founded. 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.

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.

More information: The Wall Street Journal (Europe)

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.

The WSJ European publications

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 at the time of Kilgore's death in 1967. Under Kilgore, in 1947, the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize for William Henry Grimes's editorials.

In 1967, Dow Jones Newswires began a major expansion outside of the United States that ultimately put 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.

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.

In 2007, The Journal launched a worldwide expansion of its website to include major foreign-language editions. The paper had also shown an interest in buying the rival Financial Times.

More information: @WSJ

Where the press is free 

and every man able to read, all is safe. 

Thomas Jefferson