The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is a daily business and financial newspaper and subscription-based website edited in New York City and available worldwide. First published in 1889, the paper sold for two cents and was delivered to several hundred New York City readers. As of 2025 it had more than 4.5 million digital and print subscribers worldwide, second only to The New York Times among traditional newspapers. The Journal publishes other daily editions including The Asian Wall Street Journal, edited in Hong Kong, and The Wall Street Journal Europe, edited in Brussels.

Early days of The Journal

The Wall Street Journal was founded by Charles Henry Dow and Edward D. Jones, who had earlier teamed up to create Dow Jones & Company, primarily to cover business and financial news. (The two gave their names to the Dow Jones average, a key stock market benchmark that started out as an index of railroad stocks.) The first issue of The Journal was published on July 8, 1889, and Dow outlined the goals in a mission statement:

Its object is to give fully and fairly the daily news attending the fluctuations in prices of stocks, bonds, and some classes of commodities. It will aim steadily at being a paper of news and not a paper of opinions.

The paper’s initial coverage was tied closely to news affecting businesses and the stock market, and to this day it is considered the paper of record for financial news. Dow sold the paper in 1902 to Boston businessman Clarence W. Barron, who over the next several decades would grow the paper in size and scope. Barron also instilled in the news staff the need to report rigorously on corporate earnings and accounting. The newspaper’s circulation would grow sevenfold (from 7,000 to nearly 50,000) between 1902 and Barron’s death in 1928. Barron cultivated a culture around The Journal and its readers that continues to this day: He wanted to produce a newspaper for a class of readers that was more affluent, more influential, and more educated than average. He wanted to create a club that readers would want to join and advertisers would want to reach. After Barron’s death, Hugh Bancroft took over as president of the paper. The Bancroft family would run the paper for nearly 80 years, until its sale in 2007.

The Great Depression and beyond

Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, occurred just a week after The Journal had made a significant expansion on the West Coast. At first, the nation’s premiere business publication seemed to downplay the impact of the crash, publishing a headline on October 30, 1929, that read:

Stocks Steady After Decline

What, from a news perspective, was a boon to The Journal turned out to be a financial bust for the paper. As jobs and food became scarce, subscriptions to The Journal cratered, and its financial fortunes followed those of its namesake. Throughout the 1930s subscriptions and the size of the newspaper shrunk significantly.

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However as the economy rebounded in the late 1930s, The Journal found a new voice and a broader audience. Bernard (Barney) Kilgore was a reporter who wrote a popular column called “Dear George.” It was meant to explain business stories for the ordinary reader. When Kilgore became the paper’s managing editor in 1941, he brought a vision for a publication that was about more than the rises and falls of the stock market. He encouraged reporters to produce “situation stories,” which went beyond telling people what had happened in the news to explaining why it had happened. Kilgore led the paper until his death in 1967 and oversaw huge growth in the paper’s influence and profitability.

Late-20th-century successes and struggles

That success continued well into the 1980s. By 1983 The Journal was the largest paid-circulation paper in the United States, with 2.1 million subscribers, twice the number it had in 1966.

The advent of computers posed both an opportunity and a challenge to traditional newspaper publishers and particularly to The Journal. Its comprehensive package of financial data, including stock tables, had long been a key to its success with subscribers: It offered information they could not get elsewhere. However, in a computer-centric world, The Journal faced competition to deliver market information quickly and accurately. Early attempts to leverage their expertise into the electronic data publishing realm were abysmal failures, and by the late 1990s The Journal had stiff competition from Bloomberg News and Reuters.

The journalistic mission of the paper continued to expand and evolve. It launched editions to serve markets in Asia and Europe in 1976 and 1983 and added sections including “Marketplace” and “Money & Investing” in the 1980s. In 1996 The Journal began its first online edition; even as many other publishers were offering their news online for free, The Journal adhered to a subscription model that would continue to prove profitable.

The Journal in the 21st century

The morning of September 11, 2001, was bright and crisp in lower Manhattan. The offices of The Journal newsroom were just across the street from the World Trade Center, and when the South Tower collapsed, it shattered the windows of The Journal offices. While reporters and editors evacuated to a printing plant in New Jersey and publication of the paper seemed in serious jeopardy, editor John Bussey observed from the offices and then roamed the streets, reporting on the chaos unfolding around him. His reporting that day would be part of the coverage that would win The Journal the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. With devastating clarity Bussey captured the horror of those trapped in the towers:

NEW YORK—If there’s only one sight I’ll remember from the destruction of the World Trade Center, it is the flight of desperation—the headlong leap from the top-most floors by those who chose a different death than the choking smoke and flame. Some fell swinging their arms and legs, looking down as the street came up at them. Others fell on their backs, peering upward toward the flames and sky.

The Journal’s journalistic evolution continued with the addition of color photography to the historically black-and-white publication, as well as the addition of a “Personal Journal” section and a Saturday edition. But The Journal would undergo its most significant change in almost eight decades when the Bancroft family sold The Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $5 billion in 2007. Murdoch already owned Fox News, The Times of London, and the New York Post, publications that reflected their owner’s conservative positions. Although The Journal had long been seen as more conservative than most newspapers, questions about the influence that the new owner might have on news gathering roiled the newsroom. In a note to readers, Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz wrote: “The same standards of accuracy, fairness and authority will apply to this publication, regardless of ownership.”

The Journal’s newsroom has been rocked by the tragedy that sometimes accompanies world-class journalism. In January 2002 foreign correspondent Daniel Pearl was abducted in Pakistan when he went to meet with a source, someone he believed to be a leader in the country’s Islamic movement. Instead, he was seized by members of a group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. The U.S. and Pakistani governments tried to find Pearl and his captors, but on February 21, 2002, a video showing his beheading was released. He was 38 years old.

In March 2023 one of The Journal’s correspondents in Russia, Evan Gershkovich, was arrested by the Russian government and charged with being a spy. He was held in a Russian prison for 16 months before being released on August 1, 2024, as part of the largest prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War.

In December 2022 Emma Tucker was named editor of The Journal, becoming the first woman in the paper’s history to take the senior newsroom leadership role. Tucker came from The Sunday Times of London, a Murdoch publication, and her appointment was seen by some at the time as an attempt by Murdoch to assert more influence over the newsroom.

But the owner’s longtime and at-times tumultuous relationship with Pres. Donald Trump has not kept the newsroom from reporting aggressively about the president. Before Tucker became editor, the paper did investigative reporting into hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels by Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen to keep her from speaking about an alleged affair with Trump. That reporting won the paper the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. In 2025, under Tucker’s leadership, The Journal published a birthday greeting from Trump to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that featured the silhouette of a naked woman. Before publication, Trump called Tucker try to stop the story from running. When The Journal published the story despite the threat, the president sued the paper for $10 billion.

The Journal has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes, including for international reporting, investigations into business corruption, and editorial writing.

Editorial positions

As is true of most news organizations, The Wall Street Journal’s newsroom is separate from its editorial operations. Because of its roots in covering economic and financial matters, The Journal is often seen as being more conservative in its coverage than other mainstream news outlets. But it is widely regarded as unbiased in its news reporting. Its editorials are considered more conservative and more inclined to favor pro-business positions. Some editorials have raised the ire of those in The Journal’s newsroom and have, at times, contradicted its reporting on topics such as climate change.

The Journal last endorsed a presidential candidate in 1928, when it backed Herbert Hoover.