Paper Tigers.(books on the mass media's elite)(Book review)

The Wall Street Journal began as a late-nineteenth-century version of a Bloomberg terminal--a high-priced, custom-produced collection of timely data on the financial markets which was distributed to people who planned to trade on the information. Starting in 1882, Dow Jones & Co. published a financial newsletter that messenger boys would deliver to its customers on Wall Street. Not long after, the company came out with the Customer's Afternoon News Letter, an end-of-day summary, and in 1889 this publication changed its name to the Wall Street Journal. Seven years later, Adolph Ochs, the young owner of the Chattanooga Times, bought the listless New York Times for ...