The Wall Street Journal: An elementary analysis

Thesis:

The Wall Street Journal covers primarily US and International business and financial news and issues. Its aim, according to then WSJ Publisher Louis Gordon Crovitz, is to “earn and keep the trust of the world’s most demanding readers by delivering the most essential news and analysis”.

Five Facts*:

1. The Wall Street Journal is the largest national daily newspaper in the US.

2. Journalists for the Wall Street Journal have been awarded 33 Pulitzer Prizes.

3. The Wall Street Journal has over 2,000 journalists reporting in 58 countries.

4. WSJ.com, the Journal’s website, is the largest paid subscription news site on the Internet.

5. The Wall Street Journal is part of the Dow Jones Company, which is owned by News Corp.

*Fact sources from Dow Jones.

Triune Brain:

The Wall Street Journal is Neocortex intensive, with a large amount of technical vocabulary, financial terms, numbers and data. In addition to advertisements, there are also images and pictures, giving the Journal a dose of limbic experience, most of them serve only to accompany text or highlight an involved party.

8 Trends:

As most newspapers and journals do in order to form convergent media, the Wall Street Journal has a digital version of its journal. Not only is the digital version an exhibition of the Journal’s efforts to offer a convergent media, with updates of information and real time reporting, but so is the paper itself, in its own way. The Wall Street Journal publishes stock prices – evidence of how even the physical paper itself adapts to becoming convergent media.

In addition, the WSJ.com front page also has a Market Data widget, once again showing how directed the Journal is towards financial readers.

Another trend exhibited by the journal is its introduction of subjective, or more opinionated and personal journalism in the form of blogs. Both in the newspaper itself and especially on the digital version, WSJ publishes blog articles with varying topics, such as health and wellbeing, or politics, injecting a more subjective perspective into the journal.

7 Principles:

The Wall Street Journal is owned by Dow Jones, which is a subsidiary company of News Corp. Although the Journal emphasizes its impartial reporting of the news, it also has a rather conservative editorial.

While the news may be impartial as they say, the value message displayed through their editorial paints a less liberal picture as their news reporting does.

Rupert Murdoch

As a newspaper heavily involved with numbers and financial data, the journal helps readers by employing certain production techniques such as employing graphs, charts or tables to display information in a more efficient and understandable fashion.

29 Persuasive Techniques:

First and foremost, the Journal utilizes Scientific Evidence to back their articles, displaying an array of graphs, tables or diagrams in order for readers to better grasp the situation.

In addition, the WSJ uses testimonials, by inviting writers with a respectable background in their field to author articles or blogs, presenting their viewpoints and opinions.

Another persuasive technique employed by the journal is the use of plain folks. The journal publishes letters to the editors frequently, showcasing the opinions of other Wall Street Journal readers.