When did the Wall Street Journal publish its first edition?

The Wall Street Journal was founded by Charles H. Dow, of Dow Jones & Company, primarily to cover business and financial news. The first issue was published on July 8, 1889. From its founding until early in the Great Depression, the Journal rarely ventured beyond business and economic news. However, it began to carry occasional feature articles on other subjects, and after World War II this trend increased. By the 1960s the Journal regularly carried two feature articles on page one that only occasionally addressed business subjects, and then in a whimsical or amusing way.

The long-established structure of the Journal includes complete tables reporting all financial and stock market activity for the preceding day as well as thorough reports and analyses of current business topics. Published Monday through Friday (the U.S. Journal added a weekend edition in 2005), the U.S., Asian, and European editions of the Journal had a combined circulation of more than two million at the turn of the 21st century. In 2007 media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation acquired Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Journal.

The newspaper’s accuracy, as well as the breadth and detail of its coverage won it respect and success from the start. The Journal has received more than 35 Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of such events as the September 11 attacks (2001) and American corporate scandals (2003).