NRJ Book Reviews: Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, the Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism

Abstract

Richard J. Tofel, Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and Invention of Modern Journalism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009), 271 pages, $25.95 (hardcover).Review by Mary Jane PardueRichard Tofel writes that, when it came to technology, Barney Kilgore, a dominant presence at The Wall Street Journal for nearly 40 years, instinctively knew that resting on laurels could be fatal. The time was early 1950s, and great innovation was Electro-Typesetter.The Journal rolled out new technology first to set stock tables from The Associated Press in its Eastern edition. But just three years after it was merely a prototype, Electro-Typesetter was in use at all four of The Journal's printing plants.Kilgore wanted his own paper to remain at forefront of emerging technologies such as offset printing and facsimile reproduction, Tofel writes. learned of promise of such ideas from announcements by other companies and at industry conferences.Struggling journalists and newspaper owners today would do well to look back at Kilgore as a role model or at very least for inspiration. Tofel notes instructive nature of his subject's vision: More than thirty years before advent of digital publishing, Kilgore recognized that well-educated professionals were becoming overwhelmed by amount of information they were being asked to take in, and that a flood of data was actually yielding a drought of understanding.Tofel documents story of Kilgore, once described as greatest business journalist of 20th century, from his humble beginnings through his leadership of TheJournal during challenging years to his success at bringing newspaper to one million in circulation at time of his death.Kilgore's obituary in The Journal noted that his work was more famous than he was. But any journalist working at newspapers today and over last half-century can credit Kilgore for starting trends they follow. He created The Journal's signature What's News summaries, Tofel writes, which became the archetype for display of news on Internet, a medium not then dreamed of and not commercialized until nearly thirty years after his death.Kilgore emerges in book as a man ahead of his time, highly motivated, visionary and willing to take risks.He started at The Journal at age 23 in 1929, taking on his first assignment of monitoring news wire from Dow Jones News Service. Three years later, he began experimenting with journalistic forms that Tofel says would revo lutionize journalistic content. Among those were boxes that summarized main points in important stories and his famous Dear George column, a series of open letters that used clear, simple language.While dealing with complicated concepts such as deflation in a sophisticated manner, Kilgore's new column assumed that its readers were interested but not expert, eager to understand but currently confused, particularly as economic order seemed to collapse around them, Tofel writes. …