Wall Street Journal plans Saturday edition

By Frank Ahrens
Washington Post

The Wall Street Journal plans to launch a Saturday edition a year from now that will enable it to report Friday's financial news the next day and present softer content that the company hopes will attract more advertisers.

The nation's second-largest paper, with a daily circulation of 2.1 million, has struggled to overcome a depression among its two biggest advertisers — technology and financial services firms. It has battled the problem by increasing its ad base, adding feature sections that attract advertisements for luxury items such as Bentleys and resorts. In starting the Saturday edition, the Journal faces more prosaic tasks, such as acquiring the home addresses of the 30 percent of its subscribers who take the paper at work.

The Saturday edition, which is to launch on Sept. 10, 2005, will be heavy on the sort of lifestyle coverage the Journal runs in the Weekend Journal and Personal Journal sections added in recent years, the paper said yesterday.

"Friday is a big business news day, and now we don't have to wait until Monday to tell our readers about that news," Journal managing editor Paul Steiger said. "But also there are parts of the Saturday edition that will be a more leisurely read, and there's an advantage to putting that in the hands of the reader on Saturday morning so they can decide when to read it over the weekend."

The Journal plans to add 150 employees to staff the Saturday edition, about half of whom would be responsible for producing stories. The rest would do advertising, marketing and distribution work.

The Journal, owned by Dow Jones & Co., was among the hardest hit of newspapers in 2001. While other newspaper companies, such as the Tribune Co., the New York Times Co. and The Washington Post Co., began rebounding in 2002, the Journal lagged.