The Press: The Main Street Journal*

Measured by the tastes and habits of the ordinary newspaper reader, the Wall Street Journal is agonizingly dull. For determinedly conservative makeup, the Journal’s front page—six solid columns of type unrelieved by a picture—has no rival among U.S. metropolitan dailies. Its stories can hardly be called sensational: a looming shortage in milk bottles, potholes in the Inter-American Highway, a slump in the price of dried fruit, a rise in individual assets—to cite but a few of the subjects that rated Page One play last week.

But the Journal’s reader is far from ordinary. On the average, say the Journal’s promotion men, he earns $22,648 a year—an income that should insulate him from their come-on ads: “I Was Tired of ‘Living on Peanuts’ So I Started Reading the Wall Street Journal.” He does not reside near Wall Street; the Journal has more readers in California than New York, and its subscribers live in virtually all of the 3,044 counties in the continental U.S. The chances are good that he owns stock sold in at least one of the 14 markets whose activities the Journal logs regularly. The chances are even better that he lives in that vast community to which Journal President Bernard Kilgore has staked a grandiloquent claim: “Everyone who is engaged in making a living or is interested in how other people make a living.”

From 32,000 to 625,000. In 20 years, 50-year-old Barney Kilgore has presided over the transformation of the Wall Street Journal from a Depression echo of Wall Street to the fastest-moving daily in the U.S. Since 1940, circulation has grown 19-fold, from 32,000 to 625,000, ranking the Journal among the top ten U.S. dailies. The country’s only real contender for the title of national daily, the Journal is printed simultaneously in New York, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco and Dallas; beginning next year it will be printed near Springfield, Mass., and in Cleveland as well. Its 286 fulltime editorial staffers are scattered through 20 U.S. news bureaus, three in Canada and eight overseas.

The Journal’s success story parallels the prodigious post-Depression growth of the business community, where stocks and bonds traded on the New York Stock Exchange alone are worth some $382 billion today, v. $96 billion just two decades ago. Its high status is a far cry from its humble and parochial birth. Brainchild of three young men named Charles H. Dow, Edward D. Jones and Charles M. Bergstresser, who had made a modest mark by peddling financial news to customers around Wall Street, the Journal was conceived as a stock-market chronicle in 1889. When Dow. Jones & Co. was sold in 1902 to Clarence Walker Barron, a self-taught finance expert from Boston, Barron kept the Journal hard on course.

Not until after the great crash of 1929 did the Journal gradually begin to take on a new character, opening its pages to business as well as financial news. In 1935 Bernard Kilgore, a rising young hand six years out of Indiana’s DePauw University—whence he had been plucked by Dow Jones President and DePauw Alumnus Kenneth C. Hogate—was put to writing a revolutionary new Page One column, “What’s News,” a summary of national and international events. He made such a success at this and other assignments that Hogate promoted him to managing editor in 1940, with free rein to engineer other enlargements in the Journal’s charter.

Leaders & Limbs. Kilgore, who succeeded to the presidency in 1945, whipped up so many innovations that one Wall Streeter complained that the Journal belonged to “auto dealers in Keokuk.” Kilgore never denied it. Says he: “If you are publishing in Elkhart, Ind., you have got to edit for the Elkhart reader. The business community is our Elkhart.” Kilgore’s geographical positioning of the business community is unwittingly apt. Not entirely by chance, the Journal’s upper editorial echelons are stacked with DePauw alumni, among them Robert M. Feemster (’33), chairman of Dow Jones’s executive committee, Advertising Director Theodore Callis (’30), and Executive Editor Robert I. Bottorff, who was a ’29 classmate of Kilgore’s. One notable exception is the Journal’s young (33), able managing editor, Warren H. Phillips, a graduate of Queens College (’47) in New York City.

Managing Editor Phillips runs the edition-to-edition operation, from the security tables to Page One, where appear the regular columns—the Commodity Letter, the Tax Report, the Business Bulletin, the Washington Wire and, when the occasion demands, the big news story, e.g., Khrushchev’s visit, which a quartet of Journal staffers covered exhaustively. There too is the Journal’s particular trademark, the “leader”—an exhaustive, multiple-reported, multiple-edited analysis of some industry or trend. Two leaders run each day on Page One, accompanied by a third, which the Journal calls an “A head,” on such semibusinesslike subjects as life in Macao, new heart-disease drugs, the science of shaving, the Hula-Hoop fad. These features are the frosting for Journal readers, while the tables and statistics inside are their meat and potatoes.

Amid this substantial fare, readers of the Journal are at times startled by some unexpected editorial positions, e.g., its opposition to the U.S.’s armed intervention during last year’s crisis in Lebanon, its view that even Communist Paul Robeson was entitled to a passport. Sometimes, too, the Journal ventures out on a limb and falls off: “The long-embattled, highly maligned Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson,” it flatly predicted on Nov. 1, 1957, “finally is on his way out.” During the 1958 recession, with similar clairvoyance, it foresaw a federal tax cut.

Through all this, the Journal maintains what Editor Vermont C. (for Connecticut) Royster defines, not without pride, as “19th Century Liberalism.” Above all, it keeps its pencil sharpened Monday through Friday for that fellow who is making a living or is interested in how others make a living, and who will never be satisfied with peanuts.