Analysis of newspaper marketing strategy

¶ … Marketing Strategy

Wall Street Journal might be a common name for all the persons who walked at least once on the streets of the American cities; indeed, it is the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country. Moreover, it is published in New York, but it also has European and Asian editions.

With a circulation of more than 2 million in 2006, Wall Street Journal is considered to be the "U.S. daily national newspaper, the most influential American business-oriented paper and one of the most respected dailies in the world." The newspaper's sections are dedicated to American and international business and to financial news and issues. As it has been stated above, the journal is produced in New York, its name coming from that of the street on which its publishing house is situated. Moreover, an important factor which has lead to its great circulation is the fact that the editors use headcut portraits instead of photographs.

The newspaper has a long-dated history: everything started on 8 July 1889, when Charles Dowand and Edward Jones, the two owners of Dow, Jones and Company, began publishing the daily Wall Street Journal, its delivery being made via telegraph. "The Journal featured the Jones 'Average', the first of several indexes of stock and bond prices on the New York Stock Exchange." Only a few years later, in 1898, the first signs of the newspaper's popularity have started to appear and in turn the editorial was completed with a morning edition.

The two owners originated from New England with mutual roots in journalism in Providence, Rhode Island. The newspaper had not been their first object of interest, as they also led a company founded seven years earlier, having the status of a financial news agency. Even though, after the newspaper started to reach the success, the company was sold to Clarence Barron in 1902.

The Wall Street Journal proved to be different from the other newspapers -which were primarily focused on their communities' news - from the very beginning, since its articles mainly addressed to the business community: "Its object is to give fully and fairly the daily news attending the fluctuation in prices of stocks, bonds and some classes of commodities." The journal initiated several indexes of price movements of stocks, including the Dow Jones Indexes. The rest of the four-page paper was thoroughly business oriented, reporting general news in the context of its effect on the markets."

The popularity of the journal has grown rapidly and its circulation reached 7,000 copies by 1900, 18,750 copies in 1920, and 29,780 copies in 1939. Moreover, by 1934, its slogan became "The Newspaper for the Investor." major change in the newspaper's design occurred in 1945, when Bernard Kilgore became managing editor, seventeen years after the death of Clarence Barron. "Kilgore redesigned the paper, expanding its coverage to include all aspects of business, economics, and consumer affairs, including general news that had an impact on business."

The merits of the Wall Street team were firstly officially recognized in 1947, when the journal won its first Pulitzer Prize -throughout the history, it has won 13 prizes of the kind - for editorials by William Henry Grimes and, as a follow-up, regional editions started to be published. Another significant enlargement was done in1951, when the company purchased the Chicago Journal of Commerce and became a de facto national newspaper.

Once with the U.S.A. new position on the international scene in the post-World War II period, the journal's circulation grew as well, reaching over a million copies in 1960 and almost 2 million by the 1990s. As its journalists were sharing conservative business principles, the journal has soon started to be considered the voice of political conservatism in American journalism. Its rapid growth as well allowed the company to expand further and launch the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1976 and the Wall Street Journal Europe in 1983. In the 1990s, Wall Street Journal's local editions used to be written in thirty-eight languages worldwide, and, in addition, other two important gains occurred in the same period: Wall Street Journal Sunday, and WallStreetJournal.com. Moreover, since the beginning of the 1990s, when Paul E. Steiger became managing editor, the periodical has won 14 Pulitzer Prizes.

Once with the beginning of the new century, some changes occurred for the Wall Street Journal as well, more exactly the first significant ones since World War II: there has been added some color to the editions and also "in 2004, the "Money & Investing" section of the Journal was revamped, adding new features such as "Tracking the Number" and the "Street Sleuth" series." In the same year it was announced that starting by September 2005 a weekend edition was going to be published. The modernization trend continued and on October.11, 2005, it has been agreed on several design and content changes, which were put into practice by 2006, culminating in January 2007 with a revision of the Journal format to 48-inch web width from its current 60-inch web width.

A similar situation has been experienced by the Wall Street Journal Europe and the Wall Street Journal Asia, which on Oct. 17, 2005 have been turned into a more convenient and accessible compact format, with a close connection to the Wall Street Journal Online.

The reasons for which all these changes have occurred might be manifold: for example, the change in size might have occurred because of the dimensions the other newspapers in USA have, which has led to the occurrence of a standard format. In addition, the decision to leave these improvements might have occurred because of the fact that no major changes had been done since the 40s; moreover, the clients' opinions and expectations have surely changed and diversified since then, and there would have been a great danger of loosing them if nothing would have been done. In the same respects, even though the Wall Street journal has the greatest circulation in its country, new readers need to be gained all the time for the maintenance of the prestige, and a change might contribute a lot to such an attempt.

On the other hand, the appearance of the "Personal journal" might be seen as a greater attention drawn towards the readers' main interests: business issues. Therefore, Wall Street Journal has longtime ago gained its prestige as a successful business periodical, and that must be the main reason for which most of its reader buy it; in this framework, the editors did not do anything else but to offer those persons more information regarding the domain they are interested in. In addition, the spread of the capitalist current in the last decades has allowed the international market to experience an unprecedented opening, a fact that has led to significant changes in the business plan as well. Therefore, Wall Street Journal, on its position as one of the most important periodicals, had to deal with all these issues and explain them to its readers, a fact that could not have been fulfilled without any expansion.