The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is an English-language international daily newspaper published by Dow Jones & Company 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. 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 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 backdated stock options and for the adverse impact of China's booming economy.
The future of the Journal has been widely speculated on since the acquisition of Dow Jones by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The announcement that managing editor Marcus Brauchli, a 20-year veteran of the newspaper and a former foreign correspondent, would step down reinvigorated speculation that Murdoch would make deeper changes in the newspaper. Although Brauchli elected to remain at News as a consultant, his departure from the top editorial job he held for barely a year (when he took over from the long-serving Paul Steiger) stoked rumors about Murdoch's plans.
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.
Barron died in 1928, a year before Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that triggered 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.
Its reputation secure as the nation's preeminent business news and conservative opinion newspaper, 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.
The Kann-House Era
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The decade that followed was perhaps the worst in the paper's history, at least as a business enterprise. Dow Jones was already being pinched financially by a write-off of its failed Telerate electronic news service when it was hit hard by the fall-off in advertising revenue that followed the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000. Ad sales fell further during the recession that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The kidnapping and murder of reporter Daniel Pearl in January 2002 seemed to put a fine point on the Journal's declining fortunes.
By 2005, Journal staffers had endured a long period of tragedy and austerity during which many were laid off and most suffered severe benefit cuts, even as management continued receiving bonuses and pay raises. Critics and shareholders noted the disconnect between management's behavior and the corporate-governance values preached by the Journal's editorial page. (The top two officers in Dow Jones, CEO Peter Kann and Journal Publisher Karen House, were a married couple, which many regarded as a violation of the arm's-length relationship that public-company officers should maintain with each other.)
By the time Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch made an offer for Dow Jones in May 2007, many of the Journal's best reporters and editors had left in disgust. Murdoch's bid -- at $60 a share about 80% higher than the prevailing market price -- struck some as excessive. In fact, said others, Murdoch knew a bargain when he saw one: The Journal's journalistic reputation, as well as that of Barron's and other Dow Jones operations, was as strong as ever. Yet Dow Jones's stock price was actually down in real terms from 20 years earlier and barely up in nominal terms. Had the stock gained a compounded 10% annually since 1985 -- a modest rate of appreciation by historical market standards -- it would have traded at around $160 at the time of Murdoch's bid. Many saw the stock's dismal performance, and the paper's ultimate fate, as a damning verdict on the Kann-House regime, which had reigned for 15 years before being ousted in early 2006 (with a collective $14 million severance package).
Murdoch's acquisition prompted further staff departures, most prominently of star financial reporter Henny Sender, who defected to the Financial Times despite a personal appeal from Murdoch reportedly made via phone from his Mediterranean yacht. Murdoch's formal acquisition of Dow Jones in December 2007 seemed to signal an end to the Journal's vaunted history.
Internet expansion
Further information: OpinionJournal.com
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 Journal's 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. As of May 2008, an annual subscription to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal cost $119 for those who do not have subscriptions to the print edition.
On November 30 of 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[citation needed], 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 Pulitzer web site. The Journal has recently made all their content free via PDF files.
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 Journal's 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. 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. This method of illustration is a consistent visual signature of the paper and reflects editorial imperatives by allowing these illustrations to be somewhat flattering, and in their consistency, clannish. 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 controls more than 60% of the voting power, 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, the New York Post, and London's The Times.
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 Journal's news and opinion sections would preserve their editorial independence from their new corporate parent: Mr. Murdoch told the Bancrofts that 'any interference -- or even hint of interference -- would break the trust that exists between the paper and its readers, something I am unwilling to countenance.' ... Mr. Murdoch and the Bancrofts agreed on standards modeled on the longstanding Dow Jones Code of Conduct. ”
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?". On the other hand, Jack Shafer a media critic for Slate.com said that although the Journal was changing, some aspects of the paper were improving.
In 1993, according to the June 5 story, Mr. Murdoch focused on building a television-satellite business in Asia by buying a controlling stake in satellite broadcaster Star TV. He accommodated the Chinese government by dropping BBC international news channel. Murdoch's managers told the South China Morning Post to stop criticizing China. HarperCollins canceled a book by Chris Patten, Britain's last governor of Hong Kong, to accommodate the Chinese government. The Times killed stories that were critical of China.
The Wall Street Journal
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