Jeff DeGeorgiaThe Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal was only going to turn 125 years old once, so we were tasked with celebrating the milestone. Unfortunately the party was prematurely cancelled, but the work lives on here.
Everyone knows The Wall Street Journal. Some may dispute it, but it's much more than a newspaper. It’s 125 years of social, political and financial influence. It’s been read by diplomats, writers, artists, financiers, firebrands, rebels and inventors. To celebrate the influence WSJ had over the years, we chose to feature 125 influential readers holding the paper that helped forge their success.
The 125 readers will be featured on wsj.com in an editorial that functions as a timeline. People will be able to scroll through 125 years of readers and get a sense of the historic nature of the Wall Street Journal and those who’ve read it.
Each reader is also featured in a series of print ads that will run in newspapers and magazines. Please click through the slideshow below.
We’ll create a book that showcases our featured Wall Street Journal readers in a collection of 125 photos, letters and Pulitzer Prize winning stories from the paper’s illustrious history. In addition, we’ll open up submissions to all Wall Street Journal readers and include them in the book along side our featured readers.
A NIGHT FOR THE NAYSAYERS
We also had a special party planned to celebrate the big anniversary. We will respond to newspaper skeptics from the past 125 years by inviting everyone who has declared the newspaper dead to our 125th birthday party, A Night For The Naysayers.
To launch, we’ll create a film that cites people declaring the newspaper dead, as long as 40 years ago. We will also drive traffic to our party registration hub via links attached to retweets of posts that purported the demise of newspapers.
We’ll invite these naysayers using personalized invitations in public mediums where they’ll be sure to receive the message.
Each skeptic we invite will be mailed a personalized invitation. In addition to their invitation, guests will be given a lifetime subscription to WSJ, which will be able to be passed down through the generations.
We'll capture the full event with a film crew, sharing bits of footage like our skeptics singing Happy Birthday on social media. The paper's lifestyle section will detail the events in the next day's paper.
