The Wall Street Journal (6-month subscription)

There is something for everyone in the WSJ. The regular columns on investing, money, work, science and other topics provide information and analysis on those topics. The daily "middle column" article features quirky stories you generally won't find elsewhere. Personal Journal includes arts and entertainment features as well as technology reviews and the Cranky Consumer--a column that tests various merchants and service providers and reports on the best sources for everything from kitchen appliances to buying fine jewelry online to setting up your blog. Special sections cover business and investing, technology and e-commerce, health, retirement and more.

Each newspaper has a political slant to its Op-Ed pages, and the WSJ is more conservative than, say, The New York Times. However, unlike the Times, the editorial slant does not affect the news reporting. The Journal is the newspaper for people who want to be well-informed on many topics.


America's newspaper   June 20, 2003
Daniel Ford (at danford dot net)
21 out of 26 found this review helpful

The United States has three national newspapers, of which USA Today is tripe, the New York Times is overweight, and the Wall Street Journal is the gold standard (small joke there :). I have read it almost every day for 30 years, for its news and opinion as well as to keep track of my money. Indeed, as the Journal and I get older, I find myself less interested in business news than in the rest of the paper. The most recent addition is the Personal Journal section that appears on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and the Weekend Journal that bulks up the Friday paper. The last, I understand, will eventually grow into a Saturday edition of the WSJ. It's full of good stuff about travel, wine, books, theater, and (of much less interest to me) religion. The editorial page is famously conservative, but that's nicely balanced by the news pages, which are generally moderate and sometimes (in the case of the Washington opinion columns) liberal. Even the op-ed page carries a column by Albert Hunt, who is as comically leftish as the editorials are sometimes comically rightish. Altogether, this is the newspaper for the intelligent American, wherever he or she may live, and whatever his or her politics. -- Dan Ford


Price review   December 8, 2006
J. Long (Anaheim, CA United States)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful

The journal is great. All the reviews state that. We don't need another redundant review.

But.

On the Wall Street Journal site, you can order a subscription for less than half the cost of the $215 Amazon charges.

Merry Xmas.


Window on the World   December 2, 2004
Legio Mortis Assassin JSG (Vortex Nox, Eye of Terror)
12 out of 17 found this review helpful

"The Wall Street Journal" is nothing less than America's true newspaper of record, a window on the world of business, finance, international affairs, and all the delicious little nuggets of news that would otherwise slip through the cracks.

I am a media carnivore: I am news-addicted. I get my news in hourly, massive slabs: from CNBC, from CNN, from the Internet---and best of all, in the brain-shatteringly early hours of the morning in the form of my daily Wall Street Journal (kudos goes, as well, to my unfailingly faithful early-rising Journal deliveryman).

With that high praise I also must dispatch a warning to the curious: if you subscribe to the Journal---and if you want to be informed and ahead of the game, then you must!---you'll discover, possibly for the first time, intense agonies of Guilt. The Journal is, every single day, chock full of so many juicy, delicious, insanely informative, amazingly well-written, positively balanced nuggets of journalism on finance, politics, economics, technology, market trends, literary explosions---so much, in fact, that it's an embarrassment of riches. If you're busy---and who isn't?---then you simply won't have time to read everything.

Like Caesar's Roman Gaul, The Wall Street Journal is also divided into three parts: the Front page, Marketplace, and Money & Investing. Page One is my beachhead in the morning: I scan the middle two columns for the financial and geopolitical earth movers---and if I have the time, I can dig into the paper for all the gory details. The news here is uniformly objective: opinion is cut out, the wounds cauterized, and the unbiased opinion itself served up piping hot on the Journal's editorial page.

Marketplace deals with macro and micro business trends, and is always engagingly written. Sometimes the supplement "Personal Journal" accompies the fleet out; more often than not, there's another tasty little section dealing with mutual funds, technology trends, industry strategies, and quite a bit more. It's a veritable treasure-house of knowledge, and since Gordon Gekko was right---the most valuable commodity in the world is information---the Wall Street Journal serves as purveyor of that most critical, that most precious commodity. And, I might add, serves it up with spice, brains, guts and panache.

Oh, and Money & Investing is a fly-by of all the major financial trends of the day: M&A, economics, currency, commodities, oil making investors shake and quake, big stock movers. All good stuff.

Finally---and I'm biased, be warned---the Editorial Page is the best on the planet, and I always scour it at lunch---always. If you want to be informed---if you want to be light years ahead of your arch-rival, that nasty VP of Finance Hastings down the hall, which naturally you do---you should at the very least read the Editorial Page. It is incisive, delicious, never boring, brimming with opinion and intelligence. Yum.

The Journal is with me in the nosebleed hours of the early morning, right beside my boiled eggs and toast and steaming cup(s) of coffee. And it's with me in the evening, when I actually get to dip into it, at leisure, with my cigar and scotch.

So subscribe to it, I say: The Wall Street Journal is an important, glorious, massively influential American institution. It's your window on the World of affairs. It's what the movers and shakers of the British Empire might have read had the Empire survived into the 21st century: and yes, you have the news of the world, at your fingertips, hauled back from the Journal's far-flung outposts across the globe: from Hong Kong, London, Kuala Lumphur. Sincere Kudos to the Journal's officer corps: Karen Elliott House, the Publisher; Paul Steiger, Managing Editor; and Paul Gigot, Editorial Page Editor---and the brilliant, dedicated, blindingly talented team of reporters that work with them. Bravo!

For a decade now, not a morning has dawned without my Journal: it is my polestar and compass. It makes me richer, which makes me happier. It is a tasty read. Stop gawking and subscribe.