History of The Wall Street Journal 

By Alex Drew

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.

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,[7] 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 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.

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