The Wall Street Journal

A predecessor to The Wall Street Journal was the Kiernan News Agency founded by John J. Kiernan in 1869. In 1880, Kiernan hired Charles H. Dow and Edward D. Jones as reporters. On a recommendation of Collis Potter Huntington, Dow and Jones co-founded their own news service, Dow Jones & Company, with fellow Kiernan reporter Charles Bergstresser. Dow Jones was headquartered in the basement of 15 Wall Street, the same building as Kiernan's company next to the New York Stock Exchange Building.

The first products of Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of the Journal, were brief news bulletins, nicknamed flimsies, hand-delivered throughout the day to traders at the stock exchange. In 1883, they were aggregated in a printed daily summary called the Customers' Afternoon Letter, sold for $1.50 per month compared to the $15 a month Dow Jones bulletin service. Dow Jones opened its own printing press at 71 Broadway in 1885.

Beginning July 8, 1889, the Afternoon Letter was renamed The Wall Street Journal. The debut issue of the Journal was four pages long, with dimensions of 20 3/4 × 15 1/2 inches and cost of $0.02 per copy. In its early days, the Journal had "a tedious, blow-by-blow account of the day's business without benefit of editing," wrote Edward E. Scharff in 1986.

For nearly 40 years, the front page had a four-column format, with the middle two devoted to news briefs and the farther two filled with advertisements for brokerage services. The Journal focused on stories from news wires and listings of stocks and bonds, while occasionally covering sports or politics. One front-page story on the debut edition of The Wall Street Journal was a raw wire report about the boxing match between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain, with varying accounts of the fight citing The Boston Globe, the Baltimore American, and anonymous sources. Seldom did The Wall Street Journal publish analysis or opinion articles in its early decades. In addition to a private wire to Boston, the Journal had reporters communicate via telegraph from Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Albany, and London.

In 1896, the Journal began publishing two separate Dow Jones stock indicies, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Dow Jones Railroad Average. The first morning edition of the Journal was published on November 14, 1898. …

Since 1980, the Journal has been published in multiple sections. The Journal increased its maximum issue length to 96 pages, including up to 24 color pages, in 2002.

As of 2012, The Wall Street Journal had a global news staff of around 2,000 journalists in 85 news bureaus across 51 countries. As of 2012, it had 26 printing plants. Its Asia headquarters is in Hong Kong, but will move to Singapore after it stated it would do so in 2024.

In addition, several columnists contribute regular features to the Journal opinion page:

In addition to editorials and columns from the printed newspaper, wsj.com carries two daily web-only opinion columns:

In addition to these regular opinion pieces, on Fridays the Journal publishes a religion-themed op-ed, titled "Houses of Worship", written by a different author each week. Authors range from the Dalai Lama to cardinals.

Style & Substance is a monthly bulletin on English language usage. Each issue discusses specific language issues from the perspective of the WSJ's copyeditors according to the newspaper's internal stylebook. The first issue of Style & Substance was published in 1987 under the direction of front page editor Paul R. Martin. Front page editor Bill Power and online editor Jennifer Hicks succeeded him in 2013. The Journal announces major stylistic changes through the bulletin, such as the newspaper's abandonment of courtesy titles in 2023.

WSJ. is The Wall Street Journal's luxury lifestyle magazine. Its coverage spans art, fashion, entertainment, design, food, architecture, travel and more. Sarah Ball is Editor in Chief and Omblyne Pelier is Publisher.

Launched as a quarterly in 2008, the magazine grew to 12 issues a year for 2014. The magazine is inserted into the weekend U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal and is available on WSJ.com and in the newspaper's iPad app.

Penélope Cruz, Carmelo Anthony, Woody Allen, Scarlett Johansson, Emilia Clarke, Daft Punk, and Gisele Bündchen have all been featured on the cover.

In 2012, the magazine launched its Innovator Awards program. An extension of the November Innovators issue, the awards ceremony, held in New York City at Museum of Modern Art, honors visionaries across the fields of design, fashion, architecture, humanitarianism, art and technology.

In 2013, Adweek named WSJ. …

The Wall Street Journal editorial board members oversee the Journal's editorial page, dictating the tone and direction of the newspaper's opinion section. The Wall Street Journal does not provide details on the exact duties of board members.

Every Saturday and Sunday, three editorial page writers and host Paul Gigot, editor of the editorial page, appear on Fox News Channel's Journal Editorial Report, where they discuss current issues with a variety of guests. As editors of the editorial page, Vermont C. Royster (1958–1971) and Robert Bartley (1972–2000) provided a conservative interpretation of the news on a daily basis.

Contrasts have been noted between the Journal's news reporting and its editorial pages. "While Journal reporters keep busy informing readers," wrote one reporter in 1982, "Journal editorial writers put forth views that often contradict the paper's best reporting and news analysis." Two summaries published in 1995 by the progressive blog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and in 1996 by the Columbia Journalism Review criticized the Journal's editorial page for inaccuracy during the 1980s and 1990s. One reference work in 2011 described the editorial pages as "rigidly neoconservative" while noting that the news coverage "has enjoyed a sterling reputation among readers of all political stripes".

In July 2020, more than 280 Journal journalists and Dow Jones staff members wrote a letter to new publisher Almar Latour to criticize the opinion pages' "lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence", adding that "opinion articles often make assertions that are contradicted by WSJ reporting." The editorial board responded that its opinion pages "won't wilt under cancel-culture pressure" and that the objective of the editorial content is to be independent of the Journal's news content and offer alternative views to "the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today's media." The board's response did not address issues regarding fact-checking that had been raised in the letter.

In the 1900s, the Journal supported the antitrust efforts of President Theodore Roosevelt. However, after the ownership change from Dow to Barron, the Journal became far more unequivocally supportive of free-market economics in the 1920s. …

The Journal's reporting has been described as "small-c conservatism". Some of the Journal's former editors and reporters, such as Sarah Ellison (a Washington Post reporter as of October 2025), say that the paper has adopted a more conservative tone since Rupert Murdoch's purchase.

Its editors stress the independence and impartiality of their reporters. According to CNN in 2007, the Journal's "newsroom staff has a reputation for non-partisan reporting." Ben Smith of the New York Times described the Journal's news reporting as "small-c [conservative]", and noted that its readership leans further to the right than that of other major newspapers.

Under the ownership of Clarence W. Barron, the Journal generally restricted editorializing to its opinion pages, but a 1922 series of news articles described the organized labor movement as having "one of the most sordid records of humanity".

In a 2004 study, Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo argue the Journal's news pages have a pro-liberal bias because they more often quote liberal think tanks. They calculated the ideological attitude of news reports in 20 media outlets by counting the frequency they cited particular think tanks and comparing that to the frequency that legislators cited the same think tanks. They found that the news reporting of the Journal was the most liberal (more liberal than NPR or The New York Times). The study did not factor in editorials. Mark Liberman criticized the model used to calculate bias in the study and argued that the model unequally affected liberals and conservatives and that "the model starts with a very peculiar assumption about the relationship between political opinion and the choice of authorities to cite." The authors assume that "think tank ideology ... only matters to liberals."

The company's planned and eventual acquisition by News Corp in 2007 led to significant media criticism and discussion about whether the news pages would exhibit a rightward slant under Rupert Murdoch. An August 1, 2007, editorial responded to the questions by asserting that Murdoch intended to "maintain the values and integrity of the Journal".

In 2016 and 2017, the Journal leadership under Baker came under fire from staff members and media critics, who viewed the paper's coverage of President Donald Trump as too timid. …

The Journal has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes in its history. Staff journalists who led some of the newspaper's best-known coverage teams have later published books that summarized and extended their reporting.

In 1939, Vermont C. Royster wrote a series of articles showing the length of time required for World War I battleships to be ready for duty. One story summarized the process of manufacturing armor plates. The U.S. Navy accused Royster, then a Naval Reserve officer, of using classified information for his reporting. Royster said that he obtained the information from Encyclopedia Britannica.

In October 1952, the Chicago bureau of the Journal received a press release announcing that Howard Hughes sold his controlling interest in RKO Pictures to the Empire Mail Order Company. Managing editor Henry Gemmill led reporting efforts that resulted in articles in late 1952 exposing links between Empire Mail Order and organized crime. Following these stories, Hughes canceled the RKO sale. These stories also led to the first major industry award for the Journal, a Sigma Delta Chi public service award for these stories.

On May 28, 1954, the Journal published a front-page story by John Williams revealing designs of 1955 automobiles by Ford, Pontiac, and other auto makers. Williams had talked to factory workers and auto executives for several weeks. The story revealed that the cars would have larger engines and wrap-around windshields. The inclusion of drawings was notable for being a rare use of graphics by the Journal of the time. Nearly a week later, General Motors canceled its nearly $250,000 in advertising with the Journal; GM president Harlow Curtice accused the Journal of copyright infringement and breach of confidentiality. Richard Tofel of ProPublica commented on this story in 2015: "The little-remembered incident helped establish the notion that news organizations could and should preserve their independence from advertisers."

On August 7, 1973, in an article by Jerry Landauer, the Journal was the first publication to report that U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew was under federal investigation on bribery, extortion, and tax fraud charges. Agnew released a statement confirming the investigation on the night before the Journal article was published. …