Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal

This page covers the Dow Jones group.

   Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones

The Wall Street Journal - centrepiece of the Dow Jones group - is diversified more than the London Financial Times, with holdings in local newspapers, online services, business journals. 

   history

Dow Jones & Company 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 in 1902; circulation was then around 7,000 but climbed to 50,000 by the end of the 1920s. Barron's National Business & Financial Weekly was launched in 1921.

In the 1970s, Dow Jones acquired the Ottaway group of community newspapers - its earlier moves into consumer publishing had been unsuccessful - and expanded outside the US, taking a stake in the Far Eastern Economic Review (founded 1946) and establishing with The Asian Wall Street Journal in 1976. The Wall Street Journal Europe, published in Brussels,was launched in 1983.

In 1998 it sold its ailing Telerate financial data service to Reuters and Bloomberg competitor Bridge Information Systems.

In 1992 it launched SmartMoney magazine with Hearst. The Wall Street Journal Online was launches as WSJ.com in 1996. In 1997 it established CNBC, a global business television alliance with NBC. In 1999 Dow Jones and Holtzbrinck agreed to swap stakes in The Wall Street Journal Europe and Handelsblatt, Germany's major business newspaper.

The Wall Street Journal Sunday (focused on personal finance and careers) began publication as syndicated content in major US metropolitan Sunday newspapers in 1999. In that year Dow Jones launched Vedomosti (The Record) a business newspaper in Russia.

   studies

The Power & the Money (New York: Birch Lane Press 93) by Francis X Daly is a warts & all study of the Wall Street Journal.  More serious treatment is given in Worldly Power: The Making of the Wall Street Journal (New York: Beaufort 86) by Edward Scharff. 

Jerry Rosenberg's Inside the Wall Street Journal: The History and the Power of Dow Jones & Co. & America's Most Influential Newspaper (New York: Macmillan 88) is thinner but more entertaining than Lloyd Wendt's The Wall Street Journal: The Story of Dow Jones & the Nation's Business Newspaper (Chicago: Rand McNally 82), an official history. For the environment see John Steel Gordon's The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street As A World Power (New York: Scribners 99) and studies highlighted in the News services pages.

The following map provides an indication of Dow Jones holdings.







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