Wall Street Journal, The

History

In 1882, with two associates, newspaperman Charles Dow founded Dow Jones and Company Inc., “a news agency for the financial world.” In November 1883, the company began producing the Customers' Afternoon Letter, a printed two-page summary of the reports dispatched that day. On July 8, 1889, the Afternoon Letter became The Wall Street Journal. The four-page newspaper sold for two cents, with advertising priced at 20 cents a line.

Two years previous, the company had joined in an agreement with Clarence Barron to exchange financial news items. Barron managed a news bureau in Boston and had been producing a business newspaper for several years covering that city. The two offices, Dow Jones in New York and Barron's in Boston, reinforced one another's coverage of American business. In 1896, Barron expanded coverage into Philadelphia with the Financial Journal. But it was The Wall Street Journal, now six pages, that had the strongest reputation, and increasingly its stories reported on the national economy as well as the New York Stock Exchange. In 1898 a morning edition of the Journal was added.

When Charles Dow died in 1902, the circulation was about 7,000. In March 1903, Barron, along with The Wall Street Journal's then-editor Thomas Woodlock, bought Dow Jones for $130,000. Unhappy with the profits of the company, in 1912 Barron took over as president of Dow Jones and appointed himself as editor of the Journal. The paper soon reached 50,000 subscriptions.

Barron died in 1928, and was succeeded as president by Hugh Bancroft, his son-in-law, who served as president for the next five years; the Bancroft family would control the company until 2007. Kenneth Hogate became the Journal's managing editor, with the mandate to make it the United States' first national newspaper. The first issue of The Wall Street Journal's Pacific Coast Edition, published in San Francisco to carry West Coast financial news, appeared eight days before the October 1929 stock market crash. Although the paper was hard hit by the Depression—circulation dropped below 30,000—Hogate began a series of changes in 1934 that would eventually shape The Wall Street Journal into a new kind of daily [Page 1434]newspaper. Among these was the “What's News” digest and the paper's now iconic front-page design. The newspaper won its first Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for its editorials; it had won 33 by 2006.

The man who most shaped the modern Wall Street Journal was Bernard “Barney” Kilgore, who became editor in 1941. He expanded coverage to all aspects of business, economics, and consumer affairs, as well as any aspect of American life that had an impact on business. He also decreed that not all stories had to be in the inverted pyramid style of reporting; instead, he not only encouraged reporters to produce in-depth stories, but to experiment with literary styles. Coverage of the stock market and corporate America remained the prime objective, but it no longer dominated the pages. Kilgore also ended the use of photographs in the Journal, for both aesthetic and financial reasons, declaring them to be an unnecessary and frivolous expense.

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