The Wall Street Journal is an
English-language international daily newspaper published by
Dow Jones & Company, a division of
News Corporation, in
New York City, with
Asian and
European editions. As of 2007, it has a worldwide daily
circulation of more than 2 million, with approximately 931,000 paying online subscribers. It was the
largest-circulation newspaper in the
United States until November 2003, when it was surpassed by
USA Today. It would later regain its number one position in the United States in October of 2009. Its main rival is the
London-based
Financial Times, which also publishes several international editions.
The
Journal newspaper primarily covers
U.S. and
international business and financial news and issues—the paper's name comes from
Wall Street, the street in New York City that is the heart of the
financial district. It has been printed continuously since being founded on July 8, 1889, by
Charles Dow,
Edward Jones, and
Charles Bergstresser. The newspaper has won the
Pulitzer Prize thirty-three times, including
2007 prizes for its reporting on
backdated stock options and the adverse effects of
China's booming economy.
History
Beginnings
Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the
Journal, was founded in 1882 by reporters
Charles Dow,
Edward Jones and
Charles Bergstresser. Jones converted the small
Customers' Afternoon Letter into the
Wall Street Journal, first published in 1889, and began delivery of the Dow Jones News Service via telegraph. The
Journal featured the Jones 'Average', the first of several indexes of stock and bond prices on the New York Stock Exchange.
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.
[Crossen, Cynthia. "". The Wall Street Journal (New York), page B1, August 1, 2007.]Barron died in 1928, a year before
Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that greatly effected the
Great Depression in the United States. Barron's descendants, the
Bancroft family, would continue to control the company until 2007.
Later on, the Woodworths published the paper. Mrs. Teresa "Teddy" Woodworth was a prominent socialite of her day. The Woodworths resided at New York's
Sherry-Netherland, sharing the penthouse floor with
Cole Porter.
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 at the time of Kilgore's death in 1967. It was also on Kilgore's watch, in 1947, that the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize, for editorial writing.
The
Wall Street Journal nevertheless fell on uncertain times in the 1990s, as declining advertising and rising newsprint costs—contributing to the first-ever annual loss at Dow Jones in 1997—raised speculation that the paper might have to drastically change, or be sold.
Internet expansion
A complement to the print newspaper, the
Wall Street Journal Online was launched in 1996. In 2003, Dow Jones began to integrate reporting of the
Journals print and online subscribers together in Audit Bureau of Circulations statements. It is commonly held to be the largest paid-subscription news site on the Web, with 980,000 paid subscribers in mid-2007.
thumb|250 px|[[Vladimir Putin with Journal correspondent Karen Elliott House in 2002.]]
On November 30, 2004 Oasys Mobile and the Wall Street Journal released an application that would allow users to access content from the Wall Street Journal Online
via their mobile phone. It "will provide up-to-the-minute business and financial news from the Online Journal, along with comprehensive market, stock and commodities data, plus personalized portfolio information--directly to a cell phone."
The paper's paid content is available free, on a limited basis, to America Online subscribers,, and through the free Congoo Netpass. Many Wall Street Journal
news stories are available through free online newspapers that subscribe to the Dow Jones syndicate. Pulitzer-prize winning stories from 1995 are available free on the web site.
In September 2005, the Journal
launched a weekend edition, delivered to all subscribers, which marked a return to Saturday publication after a lapse of some 50 years. The move was designed in part to attract more consumer advertising.
In 2005 the Journal
reported a readership profile of about 60 percent top management, an average income of $191,000, an average household net worth of $2.1 million, and an average age of 55.
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.
Much of the content available on the website is however, only for subscribers. These articles provide samples but block the majority of the article unless the user logs in. Generally main news articles are accessible by the general public.Design changes
In 2006, the Journal
began including advertising on its front page for the first time. This followed the introduction of front-page advertising on the Journals European and Asian editions in late 2005.
After presenting nearly identical front-page layouts for half a century—always six columns, with the day's top stories in the first and sixth columns, "What's News" digest in the second and third, the "A-hed" feature story in the fourth and themed weekly reports in the fifth column -- the paper in 2007 decreased its
broadsheet width from 15 to 12 inches while keeping the length at 22 3/4 inches, in order to save
newsprint costs. News design consultant
Mario Garcia collaborated on the changes. Dow Jones said it would save
US$18 million a year in newsprint costs across all the
Wall Street Journal papers. This move resulted in the loss of one column of print, pushing the "A-hed" out of its traditional location (although the paper now usually includes a quirky feature story on the right side of the front page, sandwiched among the lead stories).
The paper still uses ink dot drawings called
hedcuts, introduced in 1979, rather than photographs of people, a practice unique among major newspapers and a method of illustration considered to be a consistent visual signature of the paper. The Journal still heavily employs the use of
caricatures, notably those of
Ken Fallin, such as when
Peggy Noonan memorialized recently-deceased newsman
Tim Russert.
[, Biz Bash Orlando, August 11, 2008.] Nevertheless, the use of color photographs and graphics has become increasingly common in recent years with the addition of more "lifestyle" sections.
News Corp. purchase
On May 2, 2007, News Corp. made an unsolicited takeover bid for
Dow Jones, offering
US$60 a share for stock that had been selling for
US$33 a share. The
Bancroft family, which controlled more than 60% of the voting stock, at first rejected the offer, but later reconsidered its position.
Three months later, on August 1, 2007, News Corp. and Dow Jones entered into a definitive merger agreement. The controversial
US$5 billion sale added the
Wall Street Journal to the media tycoon's news empire, which already included
Fox News Channel,
financial network unit and London's
The Times, and locally within New York,
New York Post, along with
Fox flagship station WNYW (Channel 5) and
MyNetworkTV flagship
WWOR (Channel 9).
On December 13, 2007, shareholders representing more than 60 percent of Dow Jones's voting stock approved the company's acquisition by News Corp.
In an editorial page column, publisher L. Gordon Crovitz said the Bancrofts and News Corp. had agreed that the
Journals news and opinion sections would preserve their editorial independence from their new corporate parent:[Crovitz, L. Gordon. "A Report to Our Readers". The ]Wall Street Journal
(New York), page A14, August 1, 2007.
A special committee was established to oversee The Journal's editorial integrity. But after the managing editor, Marcus Brauchli resigned on April 22, 2008, the committee said that he resigned under pressure, and that News Corporation had violated its agreement by not notifying the committee earlier. Brauchli said that he thought it was reasonable that new owners would appoint their own editor.
However, a June 5 Journal
news story quoted charges that Murdoch had made and broken similar promises in the past. One large shareholder commented that Murdoch has long "expressed his personal, political and business biases through his newspapers and television stations." Journalist Fred Emery, formerly of the British newspaper The Times, recounted an incident when Murdoch was reminded of his own earlier promises not to fire The Times' editors without independent directors' approval and allegedly responded, "God, you don't take all that seriously, do you?"Features
Since 1980, the Journal
has published in several sections. On average, The Journal
is about 96 pages long. For the year 2007, the inclusion of 44 additional Journal Reports (special sections focusing on a single issue each) was planned. Regularly scheduled sections are:
- Section One – every day; corporate news, as well as political and economic reporting and the opinion pages
- Marketplace – Monday through Friday; coverage of health, technology, media, and marketing industries (the second section was launched June 23, 1980)
- Money and Investing – every day; covers and analyzes international financial markets (the third section was launched October 3, 1988)
- Personal Journal – published Tuesday through Thursday; covers personal investments, careers and cultural pursuits (the section was introduced April 9, 2002)
- Weekend Journal – published Fridays; explores personal interests of business readers, including real estate, travel, and sports (the section was introduced March 20, 1998)
- Pursuits – formerly published Saturdays; section was originally introduced September 17, 2005 with the debut of the paper's Weekend Edition; focused on readers' lifestyle and leisure, including food and drink, restaurant and cooking trends, entertainment and culture, books, fashion, shopping, travel, sports, recreation, and the home. The Pursuits section was renamed Weekend Journal beginning with the September 15, 2007 publication.
In addition, several columnists contribute regular features to the Journal
opinion page and OpinionJournal.com:
- Weekend Edition - Rule of Law and The Weekend Interview (variety of authors)
Opinions
Editorial page
Editors
Critics
Two summaries published in 1995 by the left-leaning Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and in 1996 by the Columbia Journalism Review. criticized the editorial page of the Journal
for inaccuracy during the 1980's and 1990's.
The Journal
won its first two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial writing in 1947 and 1953.
The Journal describes the history of its editorials:
Its historical position was much the same, and spelled out the conservative foundation of its editorial page:
Every Thanksgiving the editorial page prints two famous articles that have appeared there since 1961. The first is titled "The Desolate Wilderness" and describes what the Pilgrims saw when they arrived at the Plymouth Colony. The second is titled "And the Fair Land" and describes in romantic terms the "bounty" of America. It was penned by a former editor Vermont C. Royster, whose Christmas article "In Hoc Anno Domini", has appeared every December 25 since 1949.Economic issues
During the Reagan administration, the newspaper's editorial page was particularly influential as the leading voice for supply-side economics. Under the editorship of Robert Bartley, it expounded at length on such economic concepts such as the Laffer curve and how a decrease in certain marginal tax rates and the capital gains tax can increase overall tax revenue by generating more economic activity.
In the economic argument of exchange rate regimes (one of the most divisive issues among economists), the Journal
has a tendency to support fixed exchange rates over floating exchange rates in spite of its support for the free market in other respects. For example, the Journal
was a major supporter of the Chinese yuan's peg to the dollar, and strongly disagreed with American politicians who were criticizing the Chinese government about the peg. It opposed the moves by China to let the yuan gradually float, arguing that the fixed rate benefited both the United States and China.
The Journal's
views can be compared with those of the British magazine The Economist with its emphasis on free markets . However, the Journal
demonstrates important distinctions from European business newspapers, most particularly with regard to the relative significance of, and causes of, the American budget deficit. (The Journal
generally points to the lack of foreign growth, while business journals in Europe and Asia blame the low savings rate and concordant high borrowing rate in the United States).Political issues
The editorial board has long argued for a less restrictive immigration policy. In a July 3, 1984 editorial, the board wrote: If Washington still wants to 'do something' about immigration, we propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be
open borders. This stand on
immigration reform has placed the Journal as an opponent of most conservative activists and politicians, for example
National Review, who favor heightened restrictions on immigration.
The
Journal in recent years has strongly defended
Lewis Libby, whom it portrays as the victim of a political witchhunt. It has also published editorials comparing the attacks by
Seymour Hersh, and
The New York Times on
Leo Strauss and his alleged influence in the
George W. Bush administration with those of
Lyndon LaRouche, a fringe conspiracy theorist and perennial presidential candidate.
The editorial page routinely publishes articles by scientists skeptical of the theory of
global warming, including
several influential essays by
Richard Lindzen of
MIT.
News and opinion
The Journal's editors stress the independence and impartiality of their reporters
. "A Measure of Media Bias", a December 2004 study conducted by Tim Groseclose of the
University of California, Los Angeles and Jeff Milyo of the
University of Missouri, stated that:
The methods used to calculate this bias have been challenged by
Mark Liberman, professor of computer science and the director of Linguistic Data Consortium at the
University of Pennsylvania.
Liberman says "that many if not most of the complaints directed against G&M are motivated in part by ideological disagreement -- just as much of the praise for their work is motivated by ideological agreement. It would be nice if there were a less politically fraught body of data on which such modeling exercises could be explored."
The company's planned and eventual acquisition by
News Corp. in 2007 led to significant media criticism and discussion about whether the news pages would exhibit a rightward slant under
Rupert Murdoch. An August 1 editorial responded to the questions by asserting that Murdoch intended to "maintain the values and integrity of the
Journal."
Notable reporting
The
Journal has had several series of articles which have gone on to have significant impact. They have won many Pulitzer prizes. Many of these have been transformed into books.
1987: RJR Nabisco buyout
In 1987, a bidding war ensued between several financial firms for tobacco and food giant
RJR Nabisco. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar documented the events in several
Journal articles. Burrough and Helyar later used these articles as the basis of a bestselling book,
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, which was turned into a
film for HBO.
1988: Insider trading
In the 1980s,
Journal reporter
James B. Stewart brought national attention to the illegal practice of
insider trading. He was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism in 1988, which he shared with
Daniel Hertzberg, who now serves as the paper's senior deputy managing editor. Stewart expanded on this theme in his book,
Den of Thieves.
1997: AIDS treatment
David Sanford, a Page One features editor who was infected with HIV in 1982 in a bathhouse from "a man whose name I didn't catch," wrote a front-page personal account of how, with the assistance of improved treatments for HIV, he went from planning his death to planning his retirement. He and other reporters wrote about the new treatments, political and economic issues, and won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting about AIDS.
2000: Enron
Jonathan Weil, a reporter at the Dallas bureau of the
Wall Street Journal, is credited with first breaking the story of financial abuses at
Enron in July 2000, although Weil himself disavows credit
Rebecca Smith and
John R. Emshwiller reported on the story regularly, and wrote a book,
24 Days.
2001: 9/11
The
Wall Street Journal claims to have sent the first news report, on the Dow Jones wire, of a plane colliding into the
World Trade Center on
Sept. 11, 2001. Its headquarters, at
One World Financial Center, was severely damaged by the collapse of the World Trade Center just across the street.
[Bussey, John. "". The Wall Street Journal, page A1, September 12, 2001. Retrieved August 8, 2007.] Top editors worried that they might miss publishing the first issue for the first time in in the paper's 112-year history. They relocated to a makeshift office at an editor's home, while sending most of the staff to Dow Jones's South Brunswick, N.J., corporate campus, where the paper had established emergency editorial facilities soon after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The paper was on the stands the next day, albeit in scaled-down form. Perhaps the most compelling story in that day's edition was a first-hand account of the Twin Towers' collapse written by then-Foreign Editor (and current Washington bureau chief) John Bussey
, who holed up in a ninth-floor Journal office, literally in the shadow of the towers, from where he phoned in live reports to CNBC as the towers burned. He narrowly escaped serious injury when the first tower collapsed, shattering all the windows in the Journal's offices and filling them with dust and debris. The
Journal won a 2002 Pulitzer prize in Breaking News Reporting for that day's stories.
The
Journal subsequently conducted a worldwide investigation of the causes and significance of 9/11, using contacts it had developed during its business coverage of the Arab world. In
Kabul, Afghanistan, a
Wall Street Journal reporter bought a pair of looted computers which had been used by leaders of
Al Qaeda to plan assassinations, chemical and biological attacks, and mundane daily activities. The encrypted files were decrypted and translated. It was during this coverage that
Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and killed by terrorists.
In 2007 the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, considered the most prestigious of the newspaper Pulitzers, for its exposure of companies that illegally
backdate the stock options they award executives in order to increase their value.
The Wall Street Journal Europe Future Leadership Institute
The Wall Street Journal Europe Future Leadership Institute (WSJE FLI) is a pan-European program initially developed by The Wall Street Journal Europe in cooperation with business schools and universities across the continent. The Journal Europe sees this partnership as an accelerator in developing its offer to its readership and current and future leaders in close collaboration with corporations, universities and business schools. The Wall Street Journal Europe Future Leadership Institute was created by VIP Program Manager Gert Van Mol in December 2007.
The Journal Europe Future Leadership Institute is a virtual institute aiming to bring together university and industry. The Institute organizes seminars, joint seminars and networking tables in addition to the daily delivery of ca 12,000 newspaper copies to 165
universities and
business schools across Europe.
See also
