The Wall Street Journal published its first issue
On this day · 8 July 1889
On a summer day in 1889, three financial reporters turned a humble news bulletin into what would become America's most influential business paper.
On July 8, 1889, Dow, Jones & Company published the first issue of The Wall Street Journal from a cramped office near the New York Stock Exchange. The paper grew out of an earlier two-page bulletin, the Customers’ Afternoon Letter, that the firm had circulated to traders since the early 1880s.
The debut edition ran just four pages and sold for two cents a copy. Its founders, reporters Charles Dow and Edward Jones, were joined by a third partner, Charles Bergstresser — though the firm’s name famously omitted him.
Its object was to give fully and fairly the daily news attending the fluctuations of stocks, bonds, and commodities.
From that modest start the Journal became the backbone of American financial reporting. In 1896 the company introduced the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a benchmark still watched worldwide. Today its founding issue survives in the holdings of the Library of Congress and major university archives, a primary record of how markets first met daily print.
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