Almanac of Story Tellers: The Wall Street Journal

   Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of July 8th

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    It is the 189th day of the year, leaving 176 days remaining in 2022.

   

The first edition of The Wall Street Journal.

On this date in 1889, The Wall Street Journal published its first edition.

    The newspaper, based in New York, told stories about the financial world -- mainly from a business perspective, focusing on economic news and its impact on society. It also told stories of society's impact on business and commerce.

    It was read, respected, and considered a paper of record by much of the business community. In the days before cable and 24-hour news, it was the best place to get the daily records of the various stock markets around the world.

    It got results. It has won more than 35 Pulitzer Prizes. For years, it had the largest daily circulation of any newspaper in the country. 

    Until 2005, it published five days a week because that's when business was done

    It is conservative in its journalism and its style. Its editorial pages are almost exclusively pro-business; its news pages historically have observed the tone of objective reporting and editing.

    For its first 100 years, the look of the paper barely changed. For some 50 years in the latter part of the 20th Century, The Journal published a strikingly similar layout on its front page every day. It did not use pictures, but illustrated its stories with hand-drawn portraits in a wood-cut format.

    A story type The Journal often used in its page one feature story -- leading with a telling anecdote as a method to get into a larger issue -- became such a staple that the style was taught in journalism schools as a way to write longer stories on public-policy questions.

    In more recent years -- especially since News Corporation, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch -- The Journal has changed its staid style, although it has maintained its conservative editorial slant. It has accepted the use of technology, and its online edition currently has more than 1.3 million subscribers.

    It has introduced color and photographs to its printed newspaper, and added a weekend edition.

    It also published editions in Asia and Europe.