The Wall Street Journal

In 1882, Charles Dow, Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser formed the financial news agency Dow Jones & Co., which delivered daily hand-written news briefs called “flimsies” to traders and subscribers around the Wall Street area.

The company soon began producing the “Customers’ Afternoon Letter,” which would include the daily average of a collection of industrial stocks, the precursor to the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

In 1889, the Customers’ Afternoon Letter became The Wall Street Journal, a four-page newspaper that sold for two cents. The Journal was one of the world’s first financial newspapers, and one of the first newspapers to appeal to readers who shared a common interest, but not necessarily a common locale.

The Wall Street Journal is an American business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper based in New York City. The Journal, along with its Asian and European editions, is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp. The newspaper is published in the broadsheet format and online.

The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, the Journal had a circulation of about 2.4 million copies (including nearly 900,000 digital subscriptions) as of March 2013, compared with USA Today's 1.7 million.

The newspaper has won 40 Pulitzer Prizes through 2017 and derives its name from Wall Street in the heart of the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The Journal has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8, 1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser.