Wall St. to Main St.

Once upon a time the Wall Street Journal would not have thought of beginning its news stories so breezily:

"Betty Grable and Clark Gable face tougher competition south of the border."

"The nation's motor truckers are hauling a full cargo of woes. . . ."

The free-&-easy approach has paid: the old superstition that businessmen like their news stories dull just isn't so. Last week, having tripled its circulation in six years, the jazzed-up Journal hit a record 113,000 a day.

To people who know its name but not its nature, the Wall Street Journal is the mouthpiece of the potbellied, silk-hatted financiers of New Masses cartoons. But the Journal insists that its loyalty to big business is not blind. On his editorial page last week, Editor William Grimes, a 1947 Pulitzer Prizewinner, tartly told the sugar industry that there was a sour taste to the industry-sponsored Sugar Act of 1948 (see BUSINESS).

Slips for Sale. The Journal, which has never lived on Wall Street, was started 58 years ago by Charles H. Dow and Edward D. Jones, as a handy summary of the financial news bulletins (called "slips") which they sent by runners to clients. It still works hand in glove with the muttering army of Dow, Jones tickers that replaced the runners.

In the bull market of the '20s, the Journal paid too much attention to stocks & bonds; in the depression it dropped nearly half its circulation. By wider coverage of all economic news and by trying to be more readable, President Kenneth C. Hogate brought it back. Hogate, who died in February, was succeeded by bright Bernard Kilgore, like his predecessor a Phi Beta Kappa from DePauw.

Not So Spot News. Black-haired "Barney" Kilgore arrived fresh from college, like most Journal men, and has never worked for any other paper. As an editor, he put a new kind of news into the Journal: the chatty, informative Page One "leaders" that look like spot news, but aren't. They may range (as they did last week) from trends in turkey-farming to the prospects for Paramount Pictures, and are often the work of many days and many men. "It doesn't have to be news today for us to think it's news," says Executive Editor William Kerby. "We deal in situations." The dealing is done six days a week at 44 Broad Street, in a block-long newsroom with chartreuse curtains and a soundproofed ceiling. As an extra service, the Journal prints tried & true jokes in a "Pepper & Salt" humor column, suggests that readers retell them at lunch "or to clear the air at a tough conference."

For all its lively style, the Journal* does not run pictures. "We used to print little head cuts with the personnel notes," says one editor. "When we stopped, readership of the column went up." But the Journal is long on charts, graphs and maps. By aiming at the Main Streets of the U.S. as well as at Wall Street, its editors think they have distributed the risk in case of another depression. "Financial people are nice people, and all that," says Kilgore, "but there aren't enough of them to make this paper go."

*No kin to the rough-ribbing Bawl Street Journal, annual parody published by the Bond Club of New York.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.