The Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones)

Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser founded a financial news service in 1882 called Dow Jones & Company, distributing handwritten "flimsies" — two-page bulletins — by messenger boys to brokers on Wall Street. On July 8, 1889, they published the first edition of The Wall Street Journal, a four-page daily newspaper priced at two cents. Dow had already established the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896 — a numerical index of the stock prices of major companies that provided a daily summary of the market's movement. The Dow Jones Average and the Journal together defined the vocabulary of American financial reporting.

The Wall Street Journal became a national newspaper by 1941, when its circulation crossed 30,000 and its readers included business executives across the United States rather than just Wall Street traders. The paper pioneered a distinctive front-page format: two columns of news summaries on either side of a central "A-hed" story — a surprising, narrative-driven feature unrelated to markets or corporate news, typically running under a whimsical headline. The A-hed became one of American journalism's most distinctive genres: deeply reported, beautifully written, about something genuinely unexpected.

Dow Jones built one of the most valuable information businesses in the world around the Journal's prestige: the Dow Jones Newswires served professional investors and traders globally; Barron's (acquired 1921) served the sophisticated retail investor; Dow Jones Indices licensed the Dow Jones Industrial Average to financial products globally. The combination of real-time market data, authoritative financial news, and a benchmark index used in trillions of dollars of financial products gave Dow Jones a suite of revenue streams more durable than most media companies.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired Dow Jones & Company in 2007 for $5 billion — paying a significant premium to acquire the Journal's journalistic prestige and global news infrastructure. The Bancroft family, which had controlled Dow Jones since 1902, accepted the deal despite significant opposition from journalists and editors concerned about Murdoch's editorial interference record at other News Corp properties. The Journal's journalistic standards were protected by an editorial independence agreement, though critics maintained the paper subsequently moved in a more ideologically conservative direction on its opinion page.

The Wall Street Journal had over 4.6 million total subscribers in early 2026, with the vast majority digital. Total Dow Jones consumer product subscriptions (including Barron's, MarketWatch, and other titles) reached 6.4 million digital subscribers. News Corp signed a landmark multi-year partnership with OpenAI in 2024, granting OpenAI access to Wall Street Journal and News Corp content for AI training in exchange for financial compensation — one of the first major licensing deals between a traditional news organisation and an AI company. The newspaper that Charles Dow had founded to deliver hand-written bulletins to Wall Street brokers was now licensing its journalism to train the AI systems that might replace some of the journalists who wrote it.