The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), often called the Journal, is an American newspaper headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It covers news broadly, with a strong focus on business and finance, and relies on a subscription model where readers must pay to access most articles and content. Published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company—a subsidiary of News Corp—the Journal is recognized as one of the United States' newspapers of record.

As of 2025, the Journal holds the largest print circulation in the U.S., with roughly 412,000 print subscribers. It also has over four million digital subscribers, placing it second nationally behind The New York Times. The newspaper’s editorial page typically takes center-right positions, while its news reporting leans more centrist. It has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes. The first issue appeared on July 8, 1889.

The Journal’s roots trace back to the Kiernan News Agency, founded by John J. Kiernan in 1869. In 1880, Kiernan hired Charles H. Dow and Edward D. Jones as reporters. Following a recommendation from Collis Potter Huntington, Dow and Jones, along with fellow Kiernan reporter Charles Bergstresser, launched their own news service, Dow Jones and Company, in the basement of 15 Wall Street—the same building as Kiernan’s firm, next to the New York Stock Exchange Building. The company’s first products were brief news bulletins, called flimsies, hand-delivered to stock exchange traders throughout the day. In 1883, these were compiled into a printed daily summary, the Customers’ Afternoon Letter, priced at $1.50 per month (versus $15 for the bulletin service). Dow Jones set up its own printing press at 71 Broadway in 1885.

On July 8, 1889, the Afternoon Letter was renamed The Wall Street Journal. The debut issue was four pages, measuring 20 3/4 by 15 1/2 inches, and cost two cents. In its early days, according to Edward E. Scharff in 1986, the Journal offered “a tedious, blow-by-blow account of the day’s business without benefit of editing.” For nearly 40 years, the front page used a four-column layout: the middle two columns held news briefs, while the outer two carried ads for brokerage services. The paper relied on wire stories and listings of stocks and bonds, occasionally covering sports or politics. One front-page story in the first edition was a raw wire report on a boxing match between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain, citing The Boston Globe, the Baltimore American, and anonymous sources. The Journal rarely published analysis or opinion pieces in its early decades. Besides a private wire to Boston, reporters communicated via telegraph from Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Albany, and London.

In 1896, the Journal began publishing two Dow Jones stock indexes: the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Dow Jones Railroad Average. The first morning edition came out on November 14, 1898. By the late 1890s, daily circulation reached 7,000. Charles Dow wrote the first “Review and Outlook” column on April 21, 1899—a front-page editorial explaining stock prices through human nature, later known as the Dow theory. Scharff considered Dow’s essays from 1899 to 1902 “stock market classics.”

In the months before his death in 1902, Dow arranged to sell Dow Jones and the Journal to Clarence W. Barron, the Boston correspondent for the Journal since 1889, for $130,000 (equivalent to $4,837,500 in 2025). Because Barron faced financial difficulties, his wife Jessie Waldron Barron made the $2,500 down payment to buy Dow Jones in 1902; Clarence first owned a Dow Jones share about ten years later. Under Barron’s ownership, Thomas F. Woodlock edited the Journal from 1902 to 1905, during which daily circulation rose from 7,000 to 11,000. William Peter Hamilton became lead editorial writer in 1908, a time when the Journal began reflecting Barron’s views. Hamilton wrote what Scharff called “daily sermons in support of free-market capitalism.” Barron and his predecessors were credited with fostering fearless, independent financial reporting—a novelty in early business journalism. In 1921, Barron’s, the premier U.S. financial weekly, was founded. Scharff described the newspaper in the Barron era as “Wall Street’s public defender” against U.S. Congress regulatory efforts. Circulation climbed to 18,750 by 1920 and briefly hit 52,000 in 1928, but did not surpass its main competitor, The Magazine of Wall Street, the leading financial publication of the time. Barron died in 1928, a year before Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that deepened the Great Depression. Barron’s descendants, the Bancroft family, controlled the company until 2007.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 posed another challenge on top of Barron’s death. William Peter Hamilton died of pneumonia on December 9, 1929, at age 63. Circulation, which had exceeded 50,000 in 1928, dropped below 28,000 in the 1930s, and the newspaper reduced from 28 to 16 pages during that decade. Dow Jones president Hugh Bancroft retired in 1932; after his death in 1933, his widow Jane Waldron Bancroft appointed Kenneth Craven “Casey” Hogate as new company president. Hogate envisioned expanding the Journal’s scope to a “more general business paper” beyond stock and bond numbers. The Journal expanded westward, debuting a West Coast edition.