Mercedes Benz and Ludhiana: ‘It’s all in the DNA’

It All Began in the Basement of a Candy Store

Clarence W. Barron’s last words, a secretary reported, were, “What’s the news?” A newshound to his dying day, Mr. Barron believed something many of his contemporaries scoffed at: You could make money selling news about business. Like the founders of Dow Jones & Co., which Mr. Barron and his wife, Jessie, bought in 1902, he believed that someday, financial news would be valuable even to people who didn’t work on Wall Street.

Jane Bancroft in 1929 (above). The first edition of The Wall Street Journal published July 8, 1889. Click to see a larger version of the front page.

In Mr. Barron’s era, business news was considered parochial and dull. Mr. Barron and a succession of Dow Jones editors and publishers would change those perceptions. Using Linotype, ticker tape, printing presses, radio, television and bits and bytes, they would prove that timely, reliable financial information was the fundamental currency of almost every part of life, from building railroads to buying kitchen sinks. At the same time, they would create a profitable and principled corporation stretching around the world.

But Dow Jones would also have its share of failures, including The National Observer and Telerate, and an insider-trading scandal. The family that largely controlled the company — descendants of Jessie Barron and her daughter from a prior marriage, Jane (Mrs. Hugh) Bancroft — let the top executives run the business. But the family didn’t always agree with their decisions — or with one another. Cautious and conservative, the company was often behind the curve on developing new channels to deliver information. Recently, it sometimes seemed as though Wall Street itself had turned against the company and its inert stock price.

Like most of their successors, for better and worse, Charles Dow and Edward Jones were journalists first, businessmen second. They had been working for a Wall Street information broker for two years when they and a third partner, Charles Bergstresser, decided to go into the financial-news business for themselves. In 1882, they opened shop in the basement of a lower Manhattan candy store, which is now home to the New York Stock Exchange. Seven years later, The Wall Street Journal was born.

Dow Jones & Company

Past Dow Jones president Clarence Barron

Mr. Dow, a reserved and tenacious reporter who took notes on his shirt cuffs, had already earned the reputation as a man who got his quotes right. Mr. Jones was a high-spirited bon vivant with a knack for analyzing financial reports.

In those days, a financial journalist was a combination private detective, stenographer and gossip columnist. “Gathering news was a bare-knuckle business,” wrote Oliver Gingold, who joined Dow Jones in 1900 and stayed for six decades. “Many companies refused to issue annual reports even to their own stockholders.” Reporters spent long hours “waiting outside directors’ rooms or corporate offices for a chance at buttonholing an ‘insider.’” Messengers shadowing the reporters ran the news back to the office where scribes made carbon copies — as many as 24 at a time — that were hand delivered to subscribers.

What soon distinguished Dow Jones from its competitors was its revolutionary approach to financial journalism: Instead of collaborating with companies and investors to manipulate the financial markets — and taking a piece of the action — they would try to impartially distinguish fact from rumor. From the beginning, they forbade their employees from investing in companies they were covering (a rule sometimes observed in the breach). An early Wall Street Journal motto was succinct but audacious: “The truth in its proper use.”

An Elite Class

The early Journal was aimed explicitly at “operators, bankers and capitalists” who would find in it “essential statistics compiled so that their pith and bearing can be readily remembered.” Much of its early coverage focused on the booming railroads; one news story was headlined, “It Is Not True That the Railroad Trunk Lines Have Agreed to Pro-rate With the Western Roads.”

For many years the Journal had no real competition, but its narrow focus and drab prose slowed its circulation growth at a time when many American newspapers were growing rapidly. The paper had 7,000 subscribers when Mr. Barron bought the company in 1902 for $130,000. But Mr. Barron and many future editors and publishers liked the idea that their readers were an elite class, wealthier, better educated and more influential than average. It meant the company could charge both subscribers and advertisers a premium for joining the club.

Although opinion was banished from its news columns, the Journal published clearly marked editorials commenting on political and economic disputes. William Hamilton, who became the editorial-page editor in 1908, set the agenda: unfettered free-market capitalism. For the most part, that meant supporting Republican political candidates and opposing taxes, trade barriers and other “half-baked Socialist schemes,” as Mr. Hamilton wrote.

“Wall Street has no prejudices,” he said disingenuously. “It likes the man it can trust, as, for instance, [Calvin] Coolidge. It merely wonders why the Democratic Party does not develop the courage of its own convictions.” Years later, President Harry S. Truman said, “That Wall Street Journal is the Republican Bible.”

Dow Jones

The newsroom of the Dow Jones news-ticker service in 1942

Charles Dow’s other lasting legacy was creating and branding a market statistic at a time when many people thought the financial markets were so irrational or corrupt as to be essentially chaotic. Mr. Dow thought the markets might be more like the ocean. Someone “who wishes to know the exact spot which marks the high tide sets a stick in the sand at the points reached by the incoming waves until the stick reaches a position where the waves do not come up to it,” he explained. He began publishing the combined average price of 11 stocks — mostly railroad companies — in 1884. The Dow Jones average of 12 industrial stocks appeared in 1896.

The company also expanded into the telegraph ticker business in 1897, promising fast and simultaneous distribution of news to brokerage houses across the country. The ticker news service, though traditionally a less-glamorous branch of the company than the newspaper, has been its financial savior during some lean times.

Mr. Jones left Dow Jones in 1899 to join a brokerage house, where he could make more money to fund the high life he so enjoyed. Mr. Dow, in failing health, sold the company to Mr. Barron and his wife three years later.

An Ideal Steward

Mr. Barron was the ideal steward for a company selling financial news when American businesses, generating huge profits, were flexing their muscles. Ebullient and self-confident, Mr. Barron expanded the paper’s coverage while preserving its independence. As the paper became more influential, market manipulators applied more pressure on Mr. Barron and his staff, usually (but not always) with little effect. “I don’t make or unmake enterprises,” Mr. Barron wrote. “I only decide what enterprises we will give a chance to unmake Dow Jones & Co. and The Wall Street Journal.”

Mr. Barron also continued other Dow Jones traditions: using simple, spare prose that would “economize the reader’s time”; training the company’s own staff; discouraging reporters from being prima donnas; and warning employees that despite their long hours, they would never get rich working for Dow Jones. During poor times, reporters would be told to take “Scotch vacations” — time off with no pay. But during the 1920s, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average more than tripled to 381, the newspaper and its ticker service also flourished.

During the last years of his reign, Mr. Barron saw one of his longtime ideals coming true: More ordinary Americans were investing in the stock market, buying a stake in the country’s growing wealth. When Mr. Barron died in October 1928, at the age of 73, the mood of the U.S. was buoyant. “The outlook for the fall months seems brighter than at any time in recent years,” the Journal proclaimed in August 1929.

Even after Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929, the worst selloff in stock-market history, the Journal’s page-one headline read, “Stocks Steady After Decline.” But the company’s unshaken faith in the U.S. financial markets couldn’t protect it from the Depression. The company watched helplessly as customers and advertisers walked away. Circulation of the Journal dropped by almost 50%, as did the number of pages per issue.

As Wall Street and the U.S. economy began rebounding in the late ’30s and ’40s, so did Dow Jones. But the days when the stock market was a free-for-all for insiders and their dupes were ending. The government was reining in the manipulators and leveling the playing field. With better communication and transportation, companies were scaling local boundaries and becoming regional or national. By the 1940s, a businessman in Portland, Maine, might want the same financial news as a businessman in Portland, Ore., as Bernard (”Barney”) Kilgore liked to say.

‘Situation Stories’

Journal readers also wanted some relief from the gobbledygook of most financial reports. They had found an ideal translator in Mr. Kilgore, a young Journal reporter who wrote a series of columns called “Dear George,” in which he tried to deconstruct financial news for a hypothetical ordinary person. The popularity of these stories persuaded the Journal’s management that if they wanted to continue expanding their readership, they had to tell a story. As Mr. Kilgore later said, “The easiest thing in the world for any reader to do is to stop reading.”

A ticker operating room (top) in 1943; the machine receiving a satellite transmission of the newspaper (bottom).

Mr. Kilgore became the Journal’s managing editor in 1941 at the age of 32. For the next 25 years, he methodically rebuilt the paper from the ground up, increasing circulation from 33,000 to 1.1 million. Probably more than any editor before or since, Mr. Kilgore defined the mission, culture and style of The Wall Street Journal, all in perfect tune with sweeping changes in American business and society. “His perception was in seeing that the nation at work is the same everywhere; labor, capital, enterprise — and the problems that grow out of all three — are the tie that binds,” said a Journal eulogy when Mr. Kilgore died in 1967.

Unassuming but intensely ambitious, Mr. Kilgore recognized that the Journal could — and should — be more than a trade paper. It should appeal to “everyone who is engaged in making a living or is interested in how other people make a living,” he said. In other words, don’t write banking stories for bankers, write for the banks’ customers. Brokers are nice people, he said, there just aren’t enough of them to keep a first-class newspaper afloat. He also joked that he had written a headline that could top almost any story the paper published: “Giant Firm on the Rocks.”

Most newspapers in Mr. Kilgore’s era were worshipping at the altar of the five W’s — the first sentence of a story would answer the questions who, what, where, when and why. The style made for fast, objective stories, but sometimes left the reader puzzling over what it all meant. Mr. Kilgore liked “situation” stories, which described an event or debate and then appraised it from different angles. A situation “doesn’t have to have happened today to be news,” he said.

He was also the architect of the paper’s distinctive front page — six almost unbroken columns of type with no advertising — which survived until 2006. Mr. Kilgore wanted the New York and Pacific Coast editions of his “national newspaper” to look as much alike as possible, which meant no photos because they couldn’t be easily and clearly transmitted. But better technology gradually enabled the company to set up printing plants and reporting bureaus across the country.

Dow Jones earned more than $13 million in 1966, the last full year of Mr. Kilgore’s formal leadership, compared with some $211,000 in 1945, when he became the company’s president.

But Mr. Kilgore was responsible for one high-profile business failure. Hoping to attract younger readers — the television generation — in 1962 he started a weekly general-interest newspaper, The National Observer, to cover “the business of living.” Scrappy, unpredictable and highly polished, the Observer attracted a respectable number of readers — 560,000 at its peak in 1973 — but could never make national advertisers understand the value of a newspaper that seemed more like a magazine. Impatient with its drag on earnings, Warren Phillips, chairman of Dow Jones, in 1977 announced that the “long effort to make the Observer self-sufficient” hadn’t succeeded. In its 15 years of publication, the paper cost the company about $34 million.

Dow Jones & Company

Past Dow Jones presidents Bernard Kilgore (left) and Warren Phillips

Some people believed that if Mr. Kilgore hadn’t died in 1967, at the age of 59, he would have been able to save what he called his “baby.” So iconic a figure was Mr. Kilgore in the Dow Jones culture that succeeding generations of managers, encountering a new idea or problem, asked themselves, “What would Barney do?”

But the Observer’s demise was a small setback compared with the vitality of The Wall Street Journal, which had become the largest paid-circulation newspaper in America. Between 1966 and 1983, circulation more than doubled to 2.1 million. Advertising rates rose more than 10% a year between 1977 and 1983, but advertisers didn’t seem to mind. Occasionally they had to be turned away because the Journal’s presses were operating at capacity. The staff expanded to cover such traditionally “noncore” subjects as law, real estate, entertainment and health care. And if most Journal employees were still not going to get rich even in the boom years, they enjoyed generous benefits.

Out of the Shadows

Other media companies couldn’t help but notice. Most publishers had traditionally considered business a secondary topic, interesting only to a handful of readers. The topic of money and how to invest it stepped out of the shadows. White-collar workers and wealthy retirees had IRAs and tax shelters, zero-coupon bonds and reverse mortgages. Anyone who earned an income had to become an amateur money manager. To maximize returns, they needed information. Competitors — Investor’s Daily, Financial Times, Money magazine, the New York Times, USA Today and eventually television — set up shop in Dow Jones’s territory.

But something even more threatening to Dow Jones’s supremacy was slowly advancing into America’s offices, including the Journal’s own newsrooms: computers. Although the Internet was still years away for most people, it was clear even in the 1980s that computers were an extremely fast and efficient means of distributing information. In 1982, Michael Bloomberg started a company offering a fast but user-friendly system of analyzing and manipulating electronic securities data.

Although Dow Jones went public in 1963, the Bancrofts remained in control, and for the most part kept their hands off the company except for taking dividend checks. They were almost as protective of their executives as they were of their own family — and they continued the tradition, begun with Mr. Kilgore, of putting journalists in charge of the company. Mr. Phillips rose from the copy desk to managing editor before serving as chief executive for 16 years; his successor, Peter Kann, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1971 India-Pakistan war, also held the position for 16 years until he reached mandatory retirement age this year. The family accepted the leaner profit margins and sometimes big blunders as unfortunate but pardonable.

And the chief executives returned the favors. In 1986, the company approved a new class of shares for the Bancroft family that had 10 times the voting power of common shares. This allowed family members to cash out some of their common shares while retaining control. If the family stuck together, the thinking went, Dow Jones would be invulnerable to hostile suitors. These actions buffered the company from corporate raiders, but also gave its managers and directors a false sense of security. And management kept the family happy with a steady flow of dividends.

Old advertisements for The Wall Street Journal, poking fun at Russia (left) and featuring a young Bill Gates (right)

Everyone knew Dow Jones had to diversify. By the late ’80s, it had become clear that the Journal was not immune to business cycles. Furthermore, cable and computers were going to sell financial information faster and cheaper than newspapers. What the Journal had that so many competitors didn’t was a superior product: Its information was valuable because it was quick and dependable. It just needed to be repackaged. To take advantage of new technology, Dow Jones needed to get into two businesses: electronic data publishing and cable television. Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, Dow Jones didn’t do either successfully. Whether these failures were due to lack of nerve or poor execution, the result was the same: Dow Jones was left behind.

Ruinous Mismatch

In 1985, Dow Jones bought a 32% stake in Telerate. Founded in 1969, it was a leader in the booming business of digital market data, particularly real-time prices of U.S. Treasury securities, on which it had a virtual monopoly. The company had grown rapidly in the ’70s, supplying statistics to tens of thousands of dedicated terminals around the world. In the early 1980s, the company reported annual earnings growth of more than 50% for five straight years.

Even as the British news service Reuters was beginning to take some of Telerate’s business, Dow Jones continued to buy pieces of the company — in 1987, Dow Jones raised its stake to 56%, in 1988 to 67%, and in 1990, to total control. In all, Dow Jones paid $1.6 billion for Telerate.

The two companies also turned out to be a ruinous mismatch. To hold its own with Reuters and the wunderkind Bloomberg, Telerate would have to be imaginative, nimble and focused. And it would have to invest millions more in developing new programs for managing data. But Dow Jones executives had little experience with that kind of work. While Reuters and Bloomberg were plowing millions back into their systems, Dow Jones was using Telerate to beef up the company’s bottom line.

Although Dow Jones finally realized Telerate needed a massive infusion of capital if it was to remain competitive — in 1997 it budgeted $650 million for a complete overhaul — it was too late. Bloomberg and Reuters had eclipsed Telerate. By 1998, when Dow Jones sold the division, it had cost the company more than $1 billion.

The company’s attempts to get into television were less costly but equally fruitless. In early 1991, Dow Jones, in partnership with Westinghouse Broadcasting Co., agreed to buy the ailing Financial News Network for about $90 million. It was an agreement in principle only, and before it was consummated, General Electric Co.’s cable news service, CNBC, offered $105 million, which the FNN promptly accepted.

Dow Jones and Westinghouse called foul, and a brisk bidding war ensued. When the dust settled, CNBC owned FNN, and Dow Jones was still looking for a way to get into television.

In 1996, in partnership with ITT, Dow Jones bought WNYC-TV from New York City for $207 million, and started WBIS. Perhaps because it had been outbid for FNN, Dow Jones lavished millions of dollars on the project, hiring an expensive staff and building a state-of-the-art television studio. Only a year later, Dow Jones and ITT sold WBIS for $257.5 million, and laid off some 250 employees. That year, 1997, Dow Jones reported its first annual loss.

Other large, traditional newspapers were also struggling. Newsprint, staff and distribution were all expensive compared with electronic information. Advertisers and subscribers had more choices about where to spend their money and time. But even by comparison with its cohort, Dow Jones’s profit margins were thin. Except for its profitable interactive edition, WSJ.com (which now has 980,000 paid subscribers), there appeared to be no engines of growth for the company, while its core product was struggling. The Journal remained one of the largest and most respected newspapers in the country, but Dow Jones as a whole seemed to have no clear idea of how to leverage its brand.

In the late 1990s, two sets of Dow Jones stockholders — one from Wall Street and one from the Bancroft family — began agitating for change. From Wall Street, money managers Michael Price and James Cramer, acting separately, acquired nearly 6% of the outstanding shares. They weren’t the kinds of investors who waited uncomplainingly for assets to appreciate.

Two young members of the Bancroft family, Elisabeth Goth and William Cox III, also decided they could no longer rubber-stamp the decisions of the company’s management and board. In interviews for several newspaper and magazine articles, they made it clear they expected more from their trust fund than they were getting.

But the rest of the family and the board hunkered down and waited for the threat to pass, and it did. Only months after buying his Dow Jones stake, Mr. Cramer sold it, telling the New York Times, “I’m discouraged. I’m going elsewhere.” And the senior Bancrofts effectively quashed the young cousins’ rebellion.

Although Dow Jones stock performed poorly in recent years, the company was far from death’s door. Under Norman Pearlstine, the Journal’s managing editor between 1983 and 1991, and his successor, Paul E. Steiger, the Journal was reinvented again. The paper added color and photographs, grew to four sections and added a Saturday edition.

The Journal newsroom on Sept. 18, 2001, one week after the fall of the Twin Towers

The Journal’s news department won 16 Pulitzer Prizes during Mr. Steiger’s tenure, including one for its breaking-news coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — even though its own office was covered in debris from the collapse of the World Trade Center across the street. Reporters and editors decamped to Dow Jones headquarters in South Brunswick, N.J., to produce the paper that day, and many remained there for nearly a year before the New York office was habitable again.

The New Millennium

Into the new millennium, readers and journalists alike continued to consider the Journal one of the best-written, best-reported newspapers in the country. Deputy Managing Editor Byron E. (”Barney”) Calame, who retired in 2005, kept such a stern watch over the paper’s ethics and language that editors debating a questionable quote or assertion once again asked themselves: “What would Barney do?”

The Journal’s new sections — the Weekend Journal and the Personal Journal — and the Saturday edition were created to expand readership and attract consumer advertising. During the dot-com bubble, advertising was strong, and Dow Jones’s stock price jumped to more than $70 a share in 2000.

But when that bubble burst, Dow Jones, and particularly The Wall Street Journal, was hit hard. For the fourth quarter of 2001, Dow Jones’s earnings fell more than 60% from a year earlier. Since then, ad revenue and circulation growth at the Journal have stalled. The company has trimmed expenses as well as the physical size of the paper and, for the first time since Mr. Kilgore banned the practice, sold advertising space on its front page. It also expanded its electronic portfolio by acquiring MarketWatch, an online financial news service, in 2005. With the mandatory retirement of both the company’s chairman, Mr. Kann, and the managing editor, Mr. Steiger, this year, the company presented a tempting target to the right buyer.

Now, Rupert Murdoch becomes the heir to the credo posted on Clarence Barron’s office wall a century ago: “The Wall Street Journal must stand for the best that is in Wall Street and reflect that which is best in United States finance.”

Write to Cynthia Crossen at cynthia.crossen@wsj.com

source: wsj

http://reddy2007.blogpsot.com

Singer Jennifer Lopez is set to star alongside hubby singer and songwriter Mark Anthony in an upcoming flick El Cantante, Sahara Samay sources said.

The dusky beauty says she wanted Marc Anthony to star in her salsa film “El Cantante” long before she married him.

Asked in New York if she had any trepidation about working with her husband on the film about King of Salsa Hector Lavoe, Lopez replied: “No, because I got the script five and half years ago and we were not together at that time, but I knew he was the guy to play the role.”

“So, I called him a month later and said, ‘Do you want to attach yourself to this?’” she recalled. “At that time, I didn’t even know I was going to play (Lavoe’s wife) Puchi to tell you the truth. But I did know that I wanted this to be the first thing I produced. So, I called him as kind of the producer of the film… and he said: ‘Yeah, of course, I love this. This guy is like my idol.’”

Lopez also said making a film with her husband seemed natural since they initially met years ago while recording a song for her first album.

“And it worked,” she said. “We just have that naturally; luckily.”

source: saharasamay

Indian Army is most respected in India. It is in number one slot. Why there is so much negative news in the army specially suicides and killing by colleagues.

Are actress Geeta Basra and upcoming director Jassi Walia, brother of Bunty Walia of GS Entertainment an item? If gossip mongers are to be believed, Geeta and Jassi are not only good friends but are also involved in a serious relationship. Geeta, when contacted, denied the news. “I am very fond of Jassi. We are very good friends. But the rumours about us being in love aren't true,” she says.

When asked how they first met, Geeta replies, “Common friends introduced us to each other. We hit it off very well. Here I find the need to mention that Jassi and I meet only in a group. We have never been out alone.”

Jassi is soon going to make his debut as a director. Geeta clarifies that though they are good friends, Jassi has not approached her to play the lead in his maiden venture. “Jassi has not signed me for his first film. I am well aware that he is making his debut as a director but I haven't been offered any role by him. Just because we are friends does not mean that he has to cast me in his film.” Talking about films, Geeta is gung-ho about the few projects that she has signed after The Train but chooses to remain mum.

source: deccan chronicle

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Reddy tops class at Osmania University's Journalism & Mass Communication.

Reddy topped the class in BCJ for the academic year 2006-07.



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