The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), also referred to simply as the Journal, is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscription model, requiring readers to pay for access to its articles and content. The Journal is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp.
As of 2023, The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by print circulation, with 609,650 print subscribers. It has 3.17 million digital subscribers, the second-most in the nation after The New York Times. The newspaper is one of the United States' newspapers of record. The first issue of the newspaper was published on July 8, 1889. The editorial page of the Journal is typically center-right in its positions. The newspaper has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes.
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 and 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. Beginning 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. By the late 1890s, daily circulation reached 7,000.
Charles Dow wrote the first "Review and Outlook" column on April 21, 1899, a front-page editorial column explaining stock prices in terms of human nature; Dow's thinking would later be known as the Dow theory. Scharff regarded Dow's essays from 1899 to 1902 as "stock market classics".
In the months before his death in 1902, Dow arranged to sell Dow Jones and the Journal to Clarence W. Barron, the Boston correspondent for the Journal since 1889, for $130,000 (equivalent to $4,724,500 in 2024). Because Barron had financial difficulties, his wife Jessie Waldron Barron made the $2,500 down payment to buy Dow Jones in 1902; Clarence would first own a Dow Jones share about ten years later.
Under Barron's ownership, Thomas F. Woodlock was editor of the Journal from 1902 to 1905. By the end of Woodlock's tenure, daily circulation for the Journal rose from 7,000 to 11,000. William Peter Hamilton became lead editorial writer in 1908, a time when the Journal began reflecting the views of Barron. Hamilton wrote what Scharff considered "daily sermons in support of free-market capitalism".
Barron and his predecessors were credited with creating an atmosphere of fearless, independent financial reporting—a novelty in the early days of business journalism. In 1921, Barron's, the United States's premier financial weekly, was founded. Scharff described the newspaper in the Barron era as "Wall Street's public defender" against regulatory efforts by the U.S. Congress. Circulation continued to rise, reaching 18,750 to 1920 and 52,000 briefly in 1928. Barron died in 1928, a year before Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that greatly affected the Great Depression in the United States. Barron's descendants, the Bancroft family, would continue to control the company until 2007.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 would be yet another challenge to the Journal on top of Barron's death. William Peter Hamilton died of pneumonia on December 9, 1929, aged 63. Circulation of the Journal, having surpassed 50,000 in 1928, dropped below 28,000 in the 1930s, and the newspaper downsized from 28 to 16 pages in the 1930s as well. Dow Jones president Hugh Bancroft retired in 1932; following his death in 1933, his widow Jane Waldron Bancroft appointed Kenneth Craven "Casey" Hogate as new company president. Hogate envisioned expanding the scope of the Journal to a "more general business paper" beyond stock and bond numbers.
Expanding westward, The Wall Street Journal debuted a West Coast edition on October 21, 1929, The Wall Street Journal Pacific Coast Edition. The Pacific Coast Edition focused on California businesses and replicated some items from the regular Wall Street Journal; however, its circulation never exceeded 3,000, and the Great Depression led numerous subscription cancellations.
By 1931, Bernard Kilgore became news editor for The Wall Street Journal, having joined the Journal copy desk in 1929. He began writing a column for the Pacific Coast Edition called "Dear George", a feature explaining obscure financial topics in simpler, plain rhetoric. "Dear George" sharply contrasted with other Wall Street Journal articles that relied on jargon that was incomprehensible even to its own reporters. The Eastern edition of the Journal began carrying "Dear George", and beginning in 1932, Kilgore wrote "Dear George" three times a week from New York for the Journal. Then in 1934, Kilgore began writing a daily news digest "What's News" for the Journal front page. Kilgore's writings attracted the attention of the White House; President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly recommended Kilgore's work about pension payments for World War I veterans and a Supreme Court decision on the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. However, the Journal continued to struggle financially, with circulation stagnant at 32,000 in 1940. Most editions were only 12 to 14 pages long, and Dow Jones made only $69,000 of profits on $2 million of revenue, mostly due to its news ticker. Scharff observed a lack of coverage about a possible U.S. role in World War II.
In the 1940s, Dow Jones took steps to restructure the Journal. Kilgore was named managing editor of the Journal in 1941 and Dow Jones CEO in 1945. Scharff described Kilgore's approach to journalism: "A Journal story had to satisfy its sophisticated readership, but it also had to be clear enough not to discourage neophytes." Additionally, Kilgore aimed to have the newspaper appeal to a national audience, by making the East Coast and West Coast editions of the Journal more homogeneous. Until printing presses and reporting bureaus could be opened on location, photographs could not be included in the Journal.
In 1947, the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize for William Henry Grimes's editorials. Also in May 1947, the Journal launched a Southwest edition based in Dallas. The newspaper also added a new slogan in 1949: "Everywhere, Men Who Get Ahead in Business Read The Wall Street Journal." Circulation grew by nearly four-fold, from 32,000 in 1940 to 140,000 in 1949; however, Kilgore's editorial reforms of the Journal had not yet entered popular understanding.
The first major journalism award for the Journal was a Sigma Delta Chi public service award, for stories in late 1952 exposing links between Empire Mail Order and organized crime. These stories followed news that Howard Hughes sold RKO Pictures to Empire Mail Order. Circulation of the Journal continued increasing throughout the 1950s, to 205,000 in 1951, 400,000 in 1955, and over 500,000 by 1957.
Warren H. Phillips became managing editor of The Wall Street Journal in 1957 after being promoted from Chicago bureau manager. Phillips was Jewish, in contrast to the largely midwestern, WASP management of the Journal at the time. Phillips, a former socialist, shifted his political views in the 1950s to reflect social liberalism and fiscal conservatism. Under Phillips, the Journal provided in-depth coverage of the civil rights movement, on the grounds that it "was something that the average businessman needed to know about". For instance, Journal coverage of the Little Rock Central High School integration crisis went beyond the largely visual, emotional elements on newspapers and television, in depicting local citizens as supportive of integration in contrast to Governor Orval Faubus and other local politicians.
During the 1962–1963 New York City newspaper strike, the Journal was the only daily newspaper to continue printing in New York City; however, after the strike, Kilgore ordered the printing presses moved from New York to Chicopee, Massachusetts effective July 1, 1963. Although Kilgore did not publicly explain his rationale then, Scharff wrote in 1986 that the move resulted from feuds between Dow Jones and the printer's union.
By Kilgore's death in 1967, Wall Street Journal circulation exceeded one million. In 1967, Dow Jones Newswires began a major expansion outside of the United States ultimately placing its journalists in every major financial center in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, and Africa. In 1970, Dow Jones bought the Ottaway newspaper chain, which at the time comprised nine dailies and three Sunday newspapers. Later, the name was changed to Dow Jones Local Media Group. The first strike affecting a Journal printing plant was a three-day strike at Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1967; that would be followed by a weeklong strike by truck drivers at the South Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1970.
The period from 1971 to 1997 brought about a series of launches, acquisitions, and joint ventures, including "Factiva", The Wall Street Journal Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, the WSJ.com website, Dow Jones Indexes, MarketWatch, and "WSJ Weekend Edition". In 2007, News Corp. acquired Dow Jones. WSJ., a luxury lifestyle magazine, was launched in 2008.
A complement to the print newspaper, The Wall Street Journal Online, was launched in 1996 and has allowed access only by subscription from the beginning. A weekly (later daily) crossword edited by Mike Shenk was introduced in 1998.
In 2003, Dow Jones began to integrate reporting of the Journal's print and online subscribers together in Audit Bureau of Circulations statements. In 2007, it was commonly believed to be the largest paid-subscription news site on the Web, with 980,000 paid subscribers. Since then, digital subscription has risen to 1.3 million as of September 2018, falling to number two behind The New York Times with 3 million digital subscriptions. In May 2008, an annual subscription to the digital edition of The Wall Street Journal cost $119 for those who do not have subscriptions to the print edition. By June 2013, the monthly cost for a subscription to the online edition was $22.99, or $275.88 annually, excluding introductory offers. Digital subscription rates increased dramatically to $443.88 per year as its popularity increased over print, with first-time subscribers paying $187.20 per year.
On November 30, 2004, Oasys Mobile and The Wall Street Journal released an app that would allow users to access content from The Wall Street Journal Online via their mobile phones.
In September 2005, the Journal launched a weekend edition, delivered to all subscribers, which marked a return to Saturday publication after a lapse of some 50 years. The move was designed in part to attract more consumer advertising.
In 2005, the Journal reported a readership profile of about 60 percent top management, an average income of $191,000, an average household net worth of $2.1 million, and an average age of 55.
In 2007, the Journal launched a worldwide expansion of its website to include major foreign-language editions. The paper had also shown an interest in buying the rival Financial Times.
The nameplate is unique in having a period at the end.
Front-page advertising in the Journal was re-introduced on September 5, 2006. This followed similar introductions in the European and Asian editions in late 2005.
After presenting nearly identical front-page layouts for half a century – always six columns, with the day's top stories in the first and sixth columns, "What's News" digest in the second and third, the "A-hed" feature story in the fourth (with 'hed' being jargon for headline) and themed weekly reports in the fifth column – the paper in 2007 decreased its broadsheet width from 15 to 12 inches while keeping the length at 223⁄4 inches, to save newsprint costs. News design consultant Mario Garcia collaborated on the changes. Dow Jones said it would save $18 million a year in newsprint costs across all The Wall Street Journal papers. This move eliminated one column of print, pushing the "A-hed" out of its traditional location (though the paper now usually includes a quirky feature story on the right side of the front page, sandwiched among the lead stories).
The paper uses ink dot drawings called hedcuts, introduced in 1979 and originally created by Kevin Sprouls, in addition to photographs, a method of illustration considered a consistent visual signature of the paper. the Journal still heavily employs the use of caricatures, including those by illustrator Ken Fallin, such as when Peggy Noonan memorialized then-recently deceased newsman Tim Russert. The use of color photographs and graphics has become increasingly common in recent years with the addition of more "lifestyle" sections.
The daily was awarded by the Society for News Design World's Best Designed Newspaper award for 1994 and 1997.
On May 2, 2007, News Corporation made an unsolicited takeover bid for Dow Jones, offering $60 per share for stock that had been selling for $36.33 per share. The Bancroft family, which controlled more than 60% of the voting stock, at first rejected the offer, but later reconsidered its position.
Three months later, on August 1, 2007, News Corporation and Dow Jones entered into a definitive merger agreement. The $5 billion sale added The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's news empire, which already included Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, London's The Times, the New York Post, and the Fox flagship station WNYW (Channel 5) and MyNetworkTV flagship WWOR (Channel 9).
On December 13, 2007, shareholders representing more than 60 percent of Dow Jones's voting stock approved the company's acquisition by News Corporation.
In an editorial page column, publisher L. Gordon Crovitz said the Bancrofts and News Corporation had agreed that the Journal's news and opinion sections would preserve their editorial independence from their new corporate parent.
A special committee was established to oversee the paper's editorial integrity. When the managing editor Marcus Brauchli resigned on April 22, 2008, the committee said that News Corporation had violated its agreement by not notifying the committee earlier. However, Brauchli said he believed that new owners should appoint their own editor.
A 2007 Journal article quoted charges that Murdoch had made and broken similar promises in the past. One large shareholder commented that Murdoch has long "expressed his personal, political and business biases through his newspapers and television stations". Former Times assistant editor Fred Emery remembers an incident when "Mr. Murdoch called him into his office in March 1982 and said he was considering firing Times editor Harold Evans. Mr. Emery says he reminded Mr. Murdoch of his promise that editors couldn't be fired without the independent directors' approval. 'God, you don't take all that seriously, do you?' Mr. Murdoch answered, according to Mr. Emery." Murdoch eventually forced out Evans.
In 2011, The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had artificially inflated its European sales numbers, by paying Executive Learning Partnership for purchasing 16% of European sales. These inflated sales numbers then enabled the Journal to charge similarly inflated advertising rates, as the advertisers would think that they reached more readers than they actually did. In addition, the Journal agreed to run "articles" featuring Executive Learning Partnership, presented as news, but effectively advertising. The case came to light after a Belgian Wall Street Journal employee, Gert Van Mol, informed Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton about the questionable practice. As a result, the then Wall Street Journal Europe CEO and Publisher Andrew Langhoff was fired after it was found out he personally pressured journalists into covering one of the newspaper's business partners involved in the issue. Since September 2011, all the online articles that resulted from the ethical wrongdoing carry a Wall Street Journal disclaimer informing the readers about the circumstances in which they were created.
The Journal, along with its parent Dow Jones & Company, was among the businesses News Corporation spun off in 2013 as the new News Corp.
In November 2016, in an effort to cut costs, the Journal's editor-in-chief, Gerard Baker, announced layoffs of staff and consolidation of its print sections. The new "Business & Finance" section combined the former "Business & Tech" and "Money & Investing" sections. The new "Life & Arts" section took the place of "Personal Journal" and "Arena". In addition, the Journal's "Greater New York" coverage was reduced and moved to the main section of paper. The section was shuttered on July 9, 2021.
A 2018 survey conducted by Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that The Wall Street Journal was considered the third most-accurate and fourth most-unbiased news organization among the general public, tenth among Democrats, and second among Republicans. In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of 38 news organizations, The Wall Street Journal was ranked the most trusted news organization by Americans. Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University wrote that the paper's "combination of respected news pages and conservative editorial pages seem to be a magic formula for generating trust across the ideological spectrum."
From 2019 through 2022, the Journal partnered with Facebook to provide content for the social-media site's "News Tab". Facebook paid the Journal in excess of $10 million during that period, terminating the relationship as part of a broader shift away from news content.
On June 13, 2022, the Journal launched a product review website called Buy Side. The website remains free and has a distinct team from the Journal newsroom.
In February 2024, the Journal laid off about 20 employees, primarily economics reporters based in Washington, D.C. Moving forward, those beats will be covered by the newspaper's New York-based business team. The next month the paper laid off another five people from its standards and ethics team. In April, the paper laid off at least 11 people from its video and social media desks. In May, the Journal cut six editorial staff positions from its Hong Kong bureau and another two reporter jobs in Singapore. Moving forward the paper will shift its focus in the region from Hong Kong to Singapore with new the creation of several new jobs at that bureau. More staff were laid off a few weeks later amid further restructuring, including at least eight reporters.
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.
Regularly scheduled sections are:
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 "Hottest Lifestyle Magazine of the Year" in its annual Hot List.
OpinionJournal.com was a website featuring content from the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. It existed separately from the news content at wsj.com until January 2008, when it was merged into the main website. The editorials (titled "Review & Outlook") reflected The Journal's conservative political editorial line, as did its regular columnists, who included Peggy Noonan, John Fund, and Daniel Henninger.
On June 30, 2020, the Journal launched WSJ Noted., a monthly digital "news and culture" magazine for subscribers aged 18–34 in a bid to attract a younger audience to the Journal. The magazine has a group of some 7,000 young adults who are invited to preview content, provide feedback, and join Q&As with Noted staff.
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. One editorial in March 1928 criticized Congressional efforts to regulate the securities industry: "People who know nothing about credit, surplus bank funds, collateral, call loans or anything else germane to the question profess to be terrified when the Stock Exchange loans attain the figure of $4 billion or more."
On April 14, 1932, the Journal published a commentary by former editor Thomas F. Woodlock criticizing the Glass–Steagall banking regulation bill: "There are those who cannot endure the sight of autonomous securities markets beyond the control of legislatures, bureaucrats, and, in fact, of courts."
In the 1980s, the newspaper's editorial page was particularly influential as the leading voice for supply-side economics. Under the editorship of Robert L. Bartley, it expounded at length on economic concepts such as the Laffer curve, and how a decrease in certain marginal tax rates and the capital gains tax could allegedly increase overall tax revenue by generating more economic activity.
In the economic argument of exchange rate regimes (one of the most divisive issues among economists), the Journal has a tendency to support fixed exchange rates over floating exchange rates.
The Journal's editorial pages and columns, run separately from the news pages, have a conservative bent and are highly influential in establishment conservative circles. Despite this, the Journal refrains from endorsing candidates and has not endorsed a candidate since 1928.
The editorial board has long argued for a pro-business immigration policy.
The Journal's editorial page was seen as critical of many aspects of Barack Obama's presidency. In particular, it has been a prominent critic of the Affordable Care Act legislation passed in 2010, and has featured many opinion columns attacking various aspects of the bill. The Journal's editorial page has also criticized the Obama administration's energy policies and foreign policy.
On October 25, 2017, the editorial board called for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to resign from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and accused Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign of colluding with Russia. In December 2017, the editorial board repeated its calls for Mueller's resignation. The editorials by the editorial board caused fractures within The Wall Street Journal, as reporters say that the editorials undermine the paper's credibility.
In October 2021, the Journal published a letter from former President Donald Trump in the Letters to the Editor section of the editorial pages. Other news sources described the contents of the letter as false and debunked claims about the 2020 presidential election. The next day, the editorial board published their own critique of Trump's letter.
The Journal editorial pages were described as a "forum for climate change denial" in 2011 due to columns that attacked climate scientists and accused them of engaging in fraud. A 2011 study found that the Journal was alone among major American print news media in how, mainly in its editorial pages, it adopted a false balance that overplayed the uncertainty in climate science or denied anthropogenic climate change altogether. That year, the Associated Press described the Journal's editorial pages as "a place friendly to climate change skeptics". In 2013, the editorial board and other opinion writers vocally criticized President Obama's plan to address climate change, mostly without mentioning climate science. A 2015 study found The Wall Street Journal was the newspaper that was least likely to present negative effects of global warming among several newspapers. It was also the most likely to present negative economic framing when discussing climate change mitigation policies, tending to take the stance that the cost of such policies generally outweighs their benefit.
Climate Feedback, a fact-checking website on media coverage of climate science, determined that multiple opinion articles range between "low" and "very low" in terms of scientific credibility. The Partnership for Responsible Growth stated in 2016 that 14% of the guest editorials on climate change presented the results of "mainstream climate science", while the majority did not. The Partnership also determined that none of the 201 editorials concerning climate change that were published in The Wall Street Journal since 1997 conceded that the burning of fossil fuels is the main cause of climate change.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Journal published numerous opinion columns opposing and misrepresenting the scientific consensus on the harms of second-hand smoke, acid rain, and ozone depletion, in addition to public policy efforts to curb pesticides and asbestos. The Journal later recognized that efforts to curb acid rain through cap-and-trade had been successful, a decade after the Clean Air Act Amendments.
Its reporting has been described as "small-c conservatism". Some of the Journal's former reporters say that the paper has adopted a more conservative tone since Rupert Murdoch's purchase.
The Journal's 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 critics, who viewed the paper's coverage of President Donald Trump as too timid. Particularly controversial was the Journal's November 2016 front-page headline that repeated Trump's false claim that "millions of people" had voted illegally in the election, only noting that the statement was "without corroboration".
Also controversial was a January 2017 note from Baker to Journal editors, directing them to avoid using the phrase "seven majority-Muslim countries" when writing about Trump's executive order on travel and immigration; Baker later sent a follow-up note "clarifying that there was 'no ban'" on the phrase, "but that the publication should 'always be careful that this term is not offered as the only description of the countries covered under the ban.'"
At a town-hall-style meeting with Journal staff in February 2017, Baker defended the paper's coverage, saying that it was objective and protected the paper from being "dragged into the political process" through a dispute with the Trump administration.
On February 19, 2020, China announced the revoking of the press credentials of three Wall Street Journal reporters based in Beijing. China accused the paper of failing to apologize for publishing articles that criticized China's efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, and failing to investigate and punish those responsible.
In June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests, journalists at the Journal sent a letter to editor in chief Matt Murray demanding changes to the way the paper covers race, policing and finance. The reporters stated that they "frequently meet resistance when trying to reflect the accounts and voices of workers, residents or customers, with some editors voicing heightened skepticism of those sources' credibility compared with executives, government officials or other entities".
The Journal has won 38 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. After pleading no contest to one charge of income tax evasion, Agnew was sentenced to a $10,000 fine and three-year suspended jail sentence. On the same day of his sentencing, Agnew resigned as vice president on October 10, 1973.
In 1987, a bidding war ensued between several financial firms for tobacco and food giant RJR Nabisco. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar documented the events in more than two dozen Journal articles. Burrough and Helyar later used these articles as the basis of a bestselling book, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, which was turned into a film for HBO.
In the 1980s, then-Journal reporter James B. Stewart brought national attention to the illegal practice of insider trading. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism in 1988, which he shared with Daniel Hertzberg, who went on to serve as the paper's senior deputy managing editor before resigning in 2009. Stewart expanded on this theme in his 1991 book, Den of Thieves.
David Sanford, a Page One features editor who was infected with HIV in 1982 in a bathhouse, wrote a front-page personal account of how, with the assistance of improved treatments for HIV, he went from planning his death to planning his retirement. He and six other reporters wrote about the new treatments, political and economic issues, and won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting about AIDS.
Jonathan Weil, a reporter at the Dallas bureau of The Wall Street Journal, is credited with first breaking the story of financial abuses at Enron in September 2000. Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller reported on the story regularly, and wrote a book, 24 Days. In October 2021, the Journal released Bad Bets, a podcast that recounted the papers reporting on Enron.
The Journal claims to have sent the first news report, on the Dow Jones wire, of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Its headquarters, at One World Financial Center, was severely damaged by the collapse of the World Trade Center just across the street. Top editors worried that they might miss publishing the first issue for the first time in the paper's 112-year history. They relocated to a makeshift office at an editor's home, while sending most of the staff to Dow Jones's South Brunswick Township, New Jersey, corporate campus. The paper was on the stands the next day, albeit in scaled-down form. The front page included a first-hand account of the Twin Towers' collapse written by then-Foreign Editor John Bussey. Holed up in a ninth-floor office next to the towers, he phoned in live reports to CNBC as the towers burned. He narrowly escaped serious injury when the first tower collapsed, shattering all the windows in the Journal's offices and filling them with dust and debris. The Journal won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting for that day's stories.
The Journal subsequently conducted a worldwide investigation of the causes and significance of 9/11, using contacts it had developed while covering business in the Arab world. In Kabul, Afghanistan, reporters Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins bought a pair of looted computers that Al Qaeda leaders had used to plan assassinations, chemical and biological attacks, and mundane daily activities. The encrypted files were decrypted and translated. It was during this coverage that terrorists kidnapped and killed Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
In 2007, the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for exposing companies that illegally backdate stock options they awarded executives to increase their value.
In 2015, a report written by the Journal's John Carreyrou alleged that blood testing company Theranos' technology was faulty and founder Elizabeth Holmes was misleading investors. According to Vanity Fair, "a damning report published in The Wall Street Journal had alleged that the company was, in effect, a sham—that its vaunted core technology was actually faulty and that Theranos administered almost all of its blood tests using competitors' equipment." The Journal has subsequently published several more reports questioning Theranos' and Holmes' credibility. In May 2018, Carreyrou released a book about Theranos, Bad Blood.
Rupert Murdoch—at the time a major investor in Theranos and owner of the Journal—lost approximately $100 million in his investments in Theranos.
On January 12, 2018, Michael Rothfeld and Joe Palazzolo reported in The Wall Street Journal that during the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen coordinated a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels for her silence regarding an alleged affair. In subsequent reports, the method of payment and many other details were extensively covered. In April of that year, FBI agents stormed Cohen's home, seizing records related to the transaction. On August 21, 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts including campaign finance violations in connection with the Daniels payment. The coverage earned the Journal the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
In June 2024 Wall Street Journal editors learned that WSJ journalist Selina Cheng was a candidate for the leadership role, or chairperson, of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the local press union. Cheng's editor demanded that she withdraw from the election and from participation in the union. However, the right to stand for election and participate in a union without employer consent are established under Hong Kong employment law. Cheng did not withdraw and was elected to the leadership role. In July 2024, Wall Street Journal chief editor Gordon Fairclough travelled to Hong Kong and fired her from her role at the WSJ. In response to press queries, the WSJ declined to comment on Cheng's case except to acknowledge there had been 'restructuring'. Cheng responded that the restructuring was a layoff of one person.
The WSJ's action against Cheng attracted criticism from media organisations, press unions and Human Rights Proponents across the globe. Chinese state media, meanwhile, celebrated Cheng's sacking, with the Chinese Communist Party-owned Global Times tabloid calling the press union "a malignant tumour that harms the city's safety and security". When Hong Kong's Security Minister made a similar statement, Cheng responded that The Wall Street Journal fired her to avoid advocating press freedom in the city. In November 2024, Cheng filed a civil lawsuit in Hong Kong against the newspaper over her firing.
In February 2025, criminal proceedings against the WSJ began in Hong Kong.
In a series of articles on News Corp, Australian online news outlet Crikey described Cheng's firing as part of "turmoil" at the WSJ and that "the global purging of newsrooms is as much about creating a politically correct workforce of reliable journalistic cadres as it is about simply saving costs."
The United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission annual report noted the significance of the event as demonstrating "the pressures on foreign media to self-censor in line with the CCP’s requirements", and that the WSJ's action "calls into question claims that foreign businesses have been unaffected by the new atmosphere following the passage of the NSL and Article 23 Ordinance."