The Journal of Commerce - 1900s

1900s

After the 1907 panic, a young editor at The Journal of Commerce, H. Parker Willis, became a leader in the drive to establish a Central Bank. He teamed up with Carter Glass, the Virginia senator, to write the Federal Reserve Act. Much of the work was done in the offices of the JoC.

Throughout its history, the JoC maintained a different perspective on the news. Coverage of major events, such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the U.S. entry into World War I, emphasized the effect on business. During World War II, the JoC reprinted and indexed the wartime regulations that controlled production and supplies.

The JoC's profits boomed during World War I with a sharp increase in advertising and circulation related to the wartime industrial expansion. The growth continued into the early 1920s. Then in 1921, the Dodsworths sold the paper to William C. Reick, who acquired it with money put up by Charles A. Stoneham, the wealthy owner of racehorses and the New York Giants. After Reick died in 1924, Stoneham appointed a new front man, Raphael Govin, who pushed the JoC into more sports coverage.

Willis, who had become editor-in-chief of the JoC in 1919, watched with alarm as the paper's profits began to dwindle, when everyone else in the Roaring Twenties was making money. After Govin died and the JoC appeared to be on the verge of extinction, the paper was purchased in 1927 by the three Ridder brothers: Bernard H., Joseph E. and Victor F. They were the sons of Herman Ridder, the publisher of the German-language Staats Zeitung, the New York Herald and the Long Island Press.

The outbreak of World War II dramatically affected financial and commodity markets. The Ridder brothers soon built a newspaper empire of their own. They sold the JoC's AP franchise, which was a valuable asset in a day when access to the AP wires was restricted to franchise-holders. This enabled them to buy the St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch. Bernard H. Ridder became publisher of the Pioneer Press-Dispatch, turning the JoC presidency over to Joseph E. Ridder.

In the postwar years, the JoC also earned a reputation as a prime source of international trade news. In 1973 the paper scooped the world on perhaps the most significant economic development of the last 30 years. Six days ahead of any other newspaper, the JoC reported that Arab nations were going to embargo oil shipments to the U.S.

On Saturday, October 20, 1973, as the Yom Kippur War raged, the world learned that Arab nations would be suspending the supply of oil to the United States. The Journal of Commerce had the story of the notorious Arab oil embargo more than a week earlier. "It was a story that impacted the entire world," said Harold Gold, who was editor of the JoC at the time. Few thought the Arab nations would use oil as a weapon against the U.S. in response to its military support for Israel, which included a $2.2 billion military aid package. There had been threats, and an attempted embargo in 1967 that failed, so most dismissed the idea that it would ever happen.

In the later part of the 20th century, the JoC intensified its coverage of shipping, earning its nickname as the Bible of the maritime industry. Shipping was transformed forever by the introduction by Malcom McLean in 1956 of the container ship. Containerized shipping made traditional breakbulk ports obsolete and provided the means for Asia's export boom, which changed the world's economic map. The JoC reported in detail on these and other developments in transportation and logistics.

The JoC never missed a day of publication, even on the day in February 1993, when terrorists detonated a bomb in the garage under the World Trade Center, killing six people. The paper's New York staff managed to find its way down the darkened, smoke-filled fire-escape stairs of the tower to safety below. The staff at the Phillipsburg, New Jersey printing plant put the paper out that day.

The shipping industry, which had flourished through the 1960s and 1970s, began a period of consolidation in the mid-1990s because of plunging freight rates. Separate shipping companies that had run multiple ads in the paper merged and eliminated competing routes. With the rapid growth of the Internet in the 1990s, many shipping companies began to switch their ship schedules onto their Web sites, where shippers around the world could access them.

Knight-Ridder decided to get out of business information altogether to focus on its daily metropolitan newspapers. In 1995, it sold the JoC to The Economist Group of London, publishers of the widely respected, The Economist. Under The Economist Group the JoC tightened its focus to cover international trade logistics. In 1999, the broadsheet newspaper was converted to a tabloid newspaper format.