The business press expanded to chronicle the Industrial Revolution, notably including The Economist, founded in 1843 and edited by businessman and essayist Walter Bagehot, considered the granddaddy of modern business news. In the United States, many early American newspapers, in fact, were commercial papers until technological improvements made it cheap enough to provide general news for a broader audience in the penny press. And while the early commercial press is credited with helping propel the growth of markets and industry and with providing the very language of capitalism, no one would mistake it for James B. Stewart. For most of its history, extending well into the twentieth century, business news was a dreary, incoherent jumble of earnings, prices, and government data. Put it this way: there is a reason there is no book called Best Business Writing 1912.

The great broadening of business news came incrementally, then suddenly. Publications conceived during the go-go 1920s (poorly timed, as it turned out: BusinessWeek started in 1929) were aimed at a growing managerial and entrepreneurial class. Henry Luce staffed his new magazine, Fortune (launched 1930), with poets and novelists, including Archibald MacLeish, James Agee, and Dwight MacDonald, on the theory that it was “easier to turn poets into business journalists than it was to turn bookkeepers into writers” (and isn’t that the truth?). Fortune in the early and mid-1930s produced a spate of business writing so radical—including a scathing series on U.S. Steel by MacDonald, then a Trotskyite sympathizer—that Luce by the mid-1930s had to retake control and install a new editor. Still, the mainstreamed Fortune helped to pioneer in-depth business reporting with the “corporation story,” the classic corporate profile that became a minor art form, a tradition represented in this volume (see: “Inside Pfizer’s Palace Coup,” by Peter Elkind and Jennifer Reingold, with Doris Burke).

The real breakthrough in American business news came in 1941. That’s when the Wall Street Journal, undistinguished editorially and in desperate shape financially, elevated to managing editor a thirty-two-year-old DePauw graduate with a deft writing touch, an easygoing manner, and a clear vision of what business news could be. Bernard S. Kilgore was a midcentury, middle-American executive out of a Frank Capra movie. A devoted family man, he rode the commuter train from Princeton, marking up that morning’s Journal, and for relaxation changed the engine of the family Ford.

But he took business-news convention and basically tore it up. He ignored the inverted pyramid. He expanded story length, installed a new narrative writing style, and threw out hide-bound definitions of what was and wasn’t a “business story.” He created a system that would be able to produce two long-form stories a day that would take readers into corners of the economy they had never before seen: a salad-oil swindle in New Jersey, Lyndon Johnson’s wife’s broadcasting empire, slave-labor camps in Houston. Eventually, Journal reporters transcended business reporting—or one could argue, expanded it—to broach almost any subject of interest. The Journal found relevant to business readers the secret shame of illiterates, the Cabrini Green housing projects, the Falun Gong, you name it. Business news was now about a lot more than just what General Electric said yesterday.

After a tense few years waiting for the new format to take hold, success and acclaim followed. By the late 1950s, Harper’s would pronounce the Journal’s rise the “outstanding phenomenon in American daily journalism in the past two decades,” adding that “whether the (journalistic) broadening brought success or vice verse is an open question.” When Kilgore took over the paper in 1941, its circulation was 35,000. By the time he died in 1967, it was more than a million; by the late 1970s, it would top 1.7 million, passing the New York Daily News to become the largest-circulation paper in the United States, a place it has held off and on ever since.

Kilgore’s expansive journalistic vision, copied elsewhere, created a permanent argument in business newsrooms over the very purpose of business news and its intended audience—hence the disagreements Dr. Tambini found in his study. These tensions are, for the most part, healthy.

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Dean Starkman writes and edits The Audit. He is CJR's Kingsford Capital Fellow.