The Wall Street Journal

Traders in lower Manhattan in the 1880s worked on rumor. Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser set up in a basement near the exchange in 1882 and began running handwritten bulletins to subscribers, then a brief afternoon summary sheet. In July 1889 they enlarged it into a daily newspaper and called it the Wall Street Journal. Its premise was that financial information, gathered honestly and delivered fast, was itself a commodity people would pay for.

Dow's other invention proved more durable than any single story. In 1896 he began publishing an average of twelve industrial stocks as a single number, a crude but legible index of whether the market was rising or falling. The Dow Jones Industrial Average grew to thirty companies and became the figure quoted on the evening news and in ordinary conversation, an imperfect gauge that critics note is price-weighted and narrow, and that the public treats anyway as the pulse of American capitalism.

The paper stayed small and technical until Bernard Kilgore, managing editor from 1941 and later chief executive, rebuilt it for readers who were not brokers. He introduced the front-page news digest, banned jargon, and commissioned the long feature stories that explained an industry through one company or one person. Printed at plants across the country from a single national edition, the Journal became the first genuinely national American newspaper and, by the 1980s, the largest by circulation.

It carried a split personality that it defended as a feature. The news pages were run on conventional reporting standards, while the editorial page kept a distinctly conservative and free-market line — supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, open immigration — and the two often disagreed in the same issue. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought Dow Jones from the Bancroft family in 2007, ending a century of family control, and the argument over whether the wall between the two halves still stood continued after the sale.