Dow Jones history

His original contributions include the compilation in 1884 of the first average of selected United States stock prices that, with some modification, developed into what are known as the Dow Jones averages.

1885: Charles Henry Dow becomes a member of the New York Stock Exchange.

In 1889, when the paper was renamed The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones opened its first out-of-town bureau, with Clarence Barron, founder of Barron's magazine, as its head.

Dow Jones & Company, a financial news publisher founded by Charles Henry Dow and Edward D. Jones, began computing a daily industrials average in 1896, using a list of 12 stocks and dividing their total price by 12.

Edward Jones left the Wall Street Journal in January 1899.

In 1900 the stockholders of Dow Jones, members of the Dow and Bergstresser families, and a few company employees received $7,500 each in addition to $1.20 a share in annual dividends.

Dow Jones was acquired in 1902 by Clarence Barron, the leading financial journalist of the day, after the death of co-founder Charles Dow.

In 1905 Charles Otis was elected president, and F.A. Russell was named to the board of directors.

Bancroft and the Barrons' daughter, Jane, married in 1907, and when Clarence Barron became ill, his son-in-law assumed increasing responsibilities in the New York offices.

By 1911 the elder Barron's health had improved, but newspaper circulation, advertising, and profits were down, which precipitated a bitter quarrel between Barron and Charles Otis.

When Clarence Barron stormed into the editorial office of the Journal in March 1912 following his election to the presidency, the staff was terrified.

During that era Dow Jones grew too, with the establishment of Barron's in 1921 and the spread of broadtape service through the nation's major cities.

Upon Barron's death in 1928, control of the company passed to his stepdaughters Jane and Martha Bancroft.

Bancroft and Hogate managed a steadily prospering company until the stock market crash of 1929, when the paper began to sustain severe losses in circulation and advertising.

Despite the Great Depression, on June 27, 1932, Dow Jones & Company published an 80-page edition of the paper celebrating its 50th anniversary and its new building on Broad Street.

Hogate, meanwhile, struggled with a low in circulation in 1938 of 28,000.

On December 21, 1949, Jane Bancroft, the last of the original Barron family, died in Boston.

In 1953 new equipment was used to set stock and bond quotations, which made it possible eventually to publish simultaneous editions of the newspaper, with identical news content and typographical quality, anywhere in the United States.

In 1961 circulation came close to 800,000, with total advertising revenues of $47.7 million.

The change of leadership traditionally had been smooth at the company helm, and so it was when Kilgore handed over the reins to William Kerby in March 1966.

In 1967 it entered a joint venture with the Associated Press, creating the APDow Jones Economic Report, which enabled it to extend its financial information to larger markets around the globe.

In 1971, long before widespread access to what became known as the information super-highway, the company introduced the Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service, which made it possible for subscribers to obtain current information via their computers.

With the advice of professional portfolio managers, the company began to move further into allied industries, venturing, for example, into textbooks with its purchase of Richard D. Irwin Inc. in 1975.

Dow Jones's operation of the National Observer never took off, and it ceased publication in 1977, when losses totaled $16.2 million after 15 years of existence.

Within two years the newspaper operation produced 94 percent of Dow Jones's profits, and it reached 1.5 million readers by 1978, when Warren Phillips became chairman, president, and chief executive officer.

In 1980 the company was reorganized along product lines into seven divisions under Phillips.

He won an Overseas Press Club award for his reporting on the Philippines, and in 1984, was named the first editorial page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal.

In that decade, sales increased from $1.13 billion a year to almost $2.48 billion—more than double—but profits stayed almost the same: $183 million in 1986 and $190 million ten years later.

The October 1987 stock market crash also had a negative impact on the Journal's financial advertisement revenue.

For the first quarter of 1989, operating income of business publications fell 33 percent, and profits were down 13 percent in its community newspaper chain.

Other company services included DowVision, launched in 1990 as a customized newswire merging information from several databases; and DowPhone, a subscription-based telephone information service for investors, providing stock quotes, news reports, and investment analysis.

During this transition to electronic publishing, Phillips retired from his company positions, first as chief executive officer in January 1991 and then as chairman the following July.

In 1993 the company, in alliance with the Hearst group, launched the successful magazine Smart Money.

In 1994 Dow Jones and American City Business Journals launched BIZ, a monthly magazine for small business.

1995: European Business News is started.

The Dow Jones News Service changed its name to Dow Jones Newswires in 1996.

With the acquisition complete, the partnership launched a combination business and sports channel, named WBIS+, in January 1997.

To help shore up its flagging television business, the company entered into a partnership with NBC in December 1998.

In June 2000 the company entered into a joint venture with Excite@Home to create Work.com, a business network offering a range of news and services that catered to specific industries.

Before joining Dow Jones in 2005, Frank worked at Merck & Co. and Siebel Systems where he focused on product and technology solutions.

Daniel first joined Dow Jones in 2006 as VP, Marketing.

The company was led by the Bancroft family, which effectively controlled 64% of all voting stock, until 2007 when an extended takeover battle saw News Corporation acquire the business.

Prior to his time in Asia, he was Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, where he oversaw a major redesign of the site in September 2008.

In 2010, he was the primary editor of a series on compromised medical research that won a George Polk Award.

Myspace suffered declining membership with the rise of rival social networking site Facebook, and News Corporation sold the site in 2011 for \$35 million, hundreds of millions of dollars less than its…

In 2014, he was a member of The Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its reporting on the Snowden documents.

Before returning to Dow Jones in 2017, Daniel was Chief Product Officer at Gannett.

On May 7, 2020 News Corp announced that Almar Latour would assume the CEO role on May 15, 2020.

David Cho joined Dow Jones as Editor in Chief of Barron’s in 2021.