Up from Wall Street

When Bernard Kilgore became managing editor of Manhattan's Wall Street Journal ten years ago, it was a worthy but dull financial sheet with a scant 30,000 readers. By pepping up the writing and broadening the news coverage, he turned the W.S.J. into one of the most readable of U.S. newspapers. As a result, Kilgore in 1945 moved up to the presidency of Dow Jones & Co., Inc., owner of the paper, and worked to expand W.S.J. into a national newspaper for businessmen. This week, with thriving editions in Dallas and San Francisco as well as Manhattan, 42-year-old Barney Kilgore moved into the Midwest. Dow Jones bought the Chicago Journal of Commerce (circ. 33,960) from Bernard J. Ridder (who also publishes the New York Journal of Commerce). Price: well over the $1,250,000 Ridder paid for it in 1947.

Hardly was the deal made when Kilgore and ten of his top executives hustled to. Chicago to start a gradual face lifting on the Journal.

Kilgore, who has never been willing to consider the W.S.J. as merely a financial paper, has labored long & hard to make it much more than that. Like many a W.S.J. staffer, he has never worked on any other paper, went to the W.S.J. as a copyreader right out of De Pauw University in 1929. Three months later, at 21, he was sent to San Francisco as news editor of the new

West Coast edition. Says Kilgore: "They needed someone in a hurry . . . and I was just out of college and easy to ship."

By 1933, when the West Coast edition was standing firmly on its feet, Kilgore's sprightly way of turning a financial story got him shipped back to New York to write a column on economic trends. Two years later, he went to Washington to head the W.S.J. bureau, and quickly became a topflight capital correspondent. When reporters once asked F.D.R. to explain a complicated Supreme Court decision on the NRA, he told them to read Kilgore's story in the W.S.J.

When he took over as W.S.J. managing editor in 1940, Kilgore insisted on lively, fresh writing and plenty of rewriting until he got it. He expanded the W.S.J.'s coverage (it now has ten domestic bureaus, three in Canada and three overseas), started the Dallas edition, put in a humor column and developed the W.S.J.'s trademark: the front page project story. These pieces weave together a number of loose news threads into single comprehensive stories on subjects ranging from the peanut industry to U.S. foreign policy.

In its new Chicago edition, as in its South and West Coast ones, W.S.J. will print much the same news and features as in Manhattan, rely on local staffers to fill in regional news. With a nationwide circulation of 157,491, Barney Kilgore expects the Chicago edition to push the figure up to more than 200,000.

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