February 12th, 2010
The Wall Street Journal (or WSJ for short) is a daily newspaper that focuses on American and international financial and business news and has a large, international readership.
It is published in New York by Dow Jones & Company, a branch of News Corporation, the second largest media group in the world. The paper is written with the American audience in mind but also publishes European and Asian editions.
Dow Jones & Company, publishers of the Wall Street Journal was founded in 1882 by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, two journalists interested in the economy, and Charles Bergtstresser, a silent partner in the group.
The paper gets its name from Wall Street, the famous street in the heart of the financial district of New York City. The Journal has since become synonymous with international trade and economics.
The Wall Street Journal was first published 1889 and has seen circulation grow from around 7,000 in the early 1900s to around 2.1 million in 2009. The paper’s main rival in the business reporting sector is the Financial Times, a daily newspaper published in London in the United Kingdom.
Across America the Wall Street Journal faces competition from USA Today to be the paper with the widest circulation across the country. As of October 2009 The Wall Street Journal holds that distinguished position.
The paper has won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for journalism an astonishing thirty three times and has been a prominent news source for recent news events such as the Enron scandal and the tragedy of September 11th. The Journal won its first Pulitzer Prize in 1947 with journalist William H. Grimes.
From its humble beginnings as a collection of business news bulletins, the paper has expanded its scope of reporting to include personality profiles and background pieces concerning some of the most prominent members of the business community.
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March 14th, 2010
When walking in the Peak District National Park it is not always immediately apparent that we are following routes which have existed since ancient times. We know, for example, that the principal attraction of the Peak to the Romans was the presence of lead, and some secondary Roman roads east of the Portway, the Roman route from Ashbourne to Buxton, all threaded their way through the five main orefields.
In Saxon and Norman times the nobles were keen on hunting and there was a Royal Forest of the Peak. This wasn’t a forest in the sense of it being a well-wooded landscape but a large area of land set aside as a hunting preserve. Some of the stone crosses which marked the boundaries of these hunting grounds, such as those at Hope Cross and Edale Cross, can still be seen today on routes which are now popular with walkers.
More recently, routes which have become exceedingly popular not just with Peak District walks but also cyclists and horse-riders, were originally constructed as railways. What is now the High Peak Trail, in the southern and central part of the National Park, was actually designed as a canal early in the 19th century, part of a link across the Peak District between Nottingham and Manchester. The canal was built to Cromford on the Nottingham side and to Whaley Bridge on the Manchester side but crossing the Peak District was fraught with difficulty. In addition to raising the canal to an elevation
well over 1000 feet above sea level, there was the problem of how to find sources of water where the underlying geology primarily consisted of leaky limestone. Before an economic solution to these difficulties could be found someone invented railways and so the route between Cromford and Whaley Bridge became one of the first lines in Britain, fully completed by 1831. It was designed still with a canal mentality, following the contours wherever possible with abrupt curves and steep inclines where the locks would have been. Even the stations had the the word ‘wharf’ in their titles. One
wonders if the present generation of recreational users of this popular route realise that they are following the line of a former railway.
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