Wall Street Journal Goes Live With Weekend Edition
Dow Jones & Co. ended a 52-year tradition of only weekday publishing with Saturday's launch of the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal.Priced at $1.50 on newsstands versus $1 for the weekday Journal, the weekend edition will cover business and financial news through the close of Friday's global markets. It also will feature a new section called Pursuits that extends its Business of Life franchise.
Founded in 1889, the Journal was published on all days except Sunday until 1953, when the New York Stock Exchange ended Saturday trading.
The move opens the door to incremental advertising, especially in categories like automotive and travel that spend heavily on newspapers over the weekend. More specifically, the Journal's weekend edition also is expected to attract advertisers in consumer categories such as wine and spirits, apparel, retail and other lifestyle products and services.
Under current plans, the weekend edition will be delivered free to all Journal subscribers and be sold on newsstands nationwide. Subscribers can provide a separate address for weekend delivery. Sixty-seven percent of the Journal's subscribers get their copy at home.
Tactics such as print ads and direct mail will work to persuade current subscribers to ask for a weekend edition Journal at home. Similar marketing will be used to generate new subscribers and newsstand buyers.
Weekend edition content also will appear free of cost on The Wall Street Journal Online's WSJ.com. The print Journal has a U.S. circulation of 1.8 million, and the online version has more than 700,000 paid subscribers worldwide. Combined, the Journal has more than 2.1 million unique print and online subscribers.
Mickey Alam Khan covers Internet marketing campaigns and e-commerce, agency news as well as circulation for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
