DOW JONES & COMPANY
Charles Henry Dow and Edward Davis Jones were reporters for a financial news agency on Wall Street in New York
City after each had worked briefly for different newspapers in Rhode Island. As friends and colleagues, Dow and Jones
discussed plans for a full-service news agency that would
provide bulletins throughout the day on financial items and
offer news articles on the activities of bankers, brokers,
financiers, and other members of the Wall Street business
community. However, their employer was not interested in
anything other than bulletins. Dow and Jones, aged thirtyone and twenty-six respectively, along with Charles Bergstresser, began their own news agency on Wall Street in
November 1882.
Dow Jones & Company attracted a sizable number of
subscribers who received carbon copies of handwritten
bulletins and news briefs from messengers throughout
each business day. Dow Jones soon issued its first daily
two-page news summary, published at the end of business
hours. In mid-1884, the company created a list of representative stocks to compute an average closing price to reflect
daily stock market activity; this list, gradually including
more stocks from various manufacturing sectors, became
the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896. Dow Jones also
arranged to trade information from other important financial centers with news agencies in those cities, which gave
subscribers additional essential information.
Dow Jones decided to publish a daily newspaper devoted
to national and international financial news. The afternoon
Wall Street Journal appeared in July 1889. The four-page
newspaper published Monday through Saturday, except on
days the stock exchanges were closed. It primarily served
several thousand subscribers in New York, but newspapers
also were shipped by railroad to cities in the northeast and
south to Washington, D.C. A morning edition started in
1898; the afternoon edition ceased in 1934 and the Saturday
edition closed in 1953.
Jones retired in 1899, as did Dow in March 1902. Clarence W. Barron, the owner of a financial news agency in
Boston whose firm was part of the news cooperative with
Dow Jones, bought the company. Barron’s, a weekly financial publication, began in 1921.
Throughout its existence, Dow Jones & Company survived and thrived by editorial and technological innovation,
enabling it to collect revenue from a variety of customers
and advertisers. Its “ticker” service to banks, brokerages,
and other premium clients started in 1897. The first regional
edition of the Wall Street Journal rolled off presses in 1929,
providing timely delivery by using material received from
New York by teletypewriter; during the early 1960s, electronic facsimile transmission and satellite relay to a network of printing facilities allowed same-day delivery of the
Journal in many major cities.
Profitable and dynamic, Dow Jones responded quickly
to new media opportunities. It invested successively in suburban newspapers, international financial publications, a
radio news service, a cable-television news network, and
online news services.
Dow Jones remained an influential and prosperous entity
during the early years of the twenty-first century.
Further Reading
Rosenberg, Jerry M. Inside The Wall Street Journal: The History
and the Power of Dow Jones & Company and America’s
Most Infl uential Newspaper. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1982.
Wendt, Lloyd. The Wall Street Journal: The Story of Dow Jones &
the Nation’s Business Newspaper. Chicago: Rand McNally
& Company, 1982.
James Landers