“A marvelous addition to any discerning reader’s bookshelves.” 

—The Dallas Morning News

than a half-century old, was in the throes of major change, and that first A-hed was a glimpse of its broader future.

     Of course, the Journal is still predominantly and preeminently a business publication, but regular readers of our pages know that the modern paper, here and globally, energetically covers politics, social issues, societal trends and, in its Friday Weekend section, travel, leisure, arts and even sports. And five days a week, the Journal on its front page delivers up an A-hed whose chief purpose is analogous to an aperitif or fine dessert—it sweetens and pleases the palate of readers ready to tackle (or take a break from) stories about bonds, microchips and commodities futures. Not that an A-hed can’t be serious; in its early days it usually was, and it still sparingly is—witness, herein, former Journal staffer Charlie McCoy’s moving tale about the efforts to save an oil-smeared sea otter during the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, or Joshua Harris Prager’s story on the personal trials of former major league baseball player Bill Buckner after his game-turning error in the 1986 World Series.

       The credit for inventing the A-hed surely goes to Bernard “Barney” Kilgore, father of the modern Wall Street Journal, and Bill Kerby, the Journal’s first Page One editor.  Mr. Kilgore, a mild-mannered Midwesterner, joined the paper right out of DePauw University and became its managing editor in 1941 at the age of 30. More clearly than anyone before, he saw the Journal’s future as a truly national newspaper, one that would keep itself rooted in Wall Street but, on its front page, deliver the wider world in a voice that tempered the urgency of a metropolitan newspaper with the analysis and stylish writing of a good magazine.  His  famous declaration--“Don’t write banking stories for bankers. Write for the banks’ customers”—cut the Journal loose from its stiff,  almost technical writing style.  He created a rewrite and editing staff for Page One and put Mr. Kerby in charge of it. Whole new forms were invented—“What’s News,” which delivered world, national and business news in punchy capsules;  the Column 1 “leder” whose aim was and is to illuminate matters of social, cultural or political importance, or to demystify events in the news ; and, not least, the A-hed. 

       Year after year, the middle column, according to Wall Street Journal readership surveys, continues to be among the paper’s best-read features. It has been emulated by countless U.S. newspapers and some magazines; journalism professors across the nation routinely clip it and give it to students with the admonition: “If you wish to write well, learn to write like this.” In 1971, a  Fortune Magazine feature on the Journal helped to cement the A-hed’s place as an icon of contemporary journalism by describing it as story often so engaging and light “as almost to float off the page.” (hence the title of this book.*)

       If Mr. Kilgore, who died in 1967, invented the A-hed, it’s also true that the form was still very much a work in progress into the 1960s. On many days, the A-hed resembled that very first one--a short business story with a quirk. (One example: a piece on how World War II was very good for the greeting-card industry.) Alternately, it was often a

news feature.  When the Soviet Union’s Nikita Kruschev visited the U.S. in September 1959, his travels and doings occupied the A-hed spot for five days running—an occurrence entwined with a bit of Barney Kilgore lore.  Or, as Fred Taylor, a former Journal managing editor who was aboard then, recalls:  "The late, great Barney Kilgore was gadget happy and had just got one of the first car phones. So the reporters trailing Kruschev used Barney's car, calling in their stories on the wonderful phone to the extent they ran down the car battery and got stuck somewhere in Iowa."

       The success of the A-hed owes as much to the quality of ideas as it does to good writing, and the idea factory itself owes much to Journal culture. Page One has always been famously picky about A-hed ideas, yet famously egalitarian about who comes up with them. It is still very much a decentralized art. Any reporter at the paper can pitch and write an A-hed for Page One, as can (and have) news assistants and interns (with proper guidance and editing, of course.)   Once an idea is accepted, the paper gives the lucky scribe what most metro newspapers would consider a languid amount of time to report and write a story that is usually under 1,500 words in length.  True, many A-heds are done in a day or two, but it isn't uncommon for A-heds to take a week to report and a week to write--even longer. Consider that when Journal staffer  Carrie Dolan alighted in the San Francisco bureau as a fresh-faced college graduate in 1982, she soon found herself in conference with Ken Slocum, the taciturn Texan who was bureau chief at the time. A clever features man, Mr. Slocum had a Texan's bias against what he considered fancy, over-priced, big-city hotels. He inexplicably shoved a note across the desk to Ms. Dolan that mused that it was probably possible for a person to travel across country for the price of a single-night in the more expensive hotels in the Journal’s headquarters city of New York.

       Carrie was starting to wonder what that had to do with her when Mr. Slocum drawled: "So Carrie, you better get goin'"--and then broke into a chorus of the Willie Nelson song, “On the Road Again.”

       And off she went,  in an account that appears in this book, driving for a week coast-to-coast in a cheap rental car, trying to prove Mr. Slocum's theory in the A-hed column. 

       Ms. Dolan’s piece shows what comes of a quirky set piece, well executed. The A-hed’s history is also filled with stories of opportunity—reporters in exotic, remote, even dangerous locations putting their well-honed features eyes to the ground around them and coming up with gems. Barry Newman, unquestionably the dean of Journal a-hed writers, was banging about the Australian Outback in the spring of 1978 when he realized that the Aussies had built a barbed-wire fence longer than the Great Wall of China to separate sheep-eating dingoes (wild dogs) from the nation’s wool crop.  It was certainly an A-hed but there was a small hurdle: a New York editor, who could not envision the splendor of such a fence from so far away, cabled Mr. Newman to say that such a story probably wasn’t worth spending more than $200 on. So  Mr. Newman rented exactly $200 of air time from a local farmer with a small plane and got the color he needed from above.

       Tony Horwitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper in 1995 for his coverage of workplace issues, recalls covering the conflict in Serbia and realizing that there were probably A-heds even in that madness. So one night, at considerable risk, he crawled up a hill above Sarajevo and into a Serbian sniper’s pit where he spent time with Serbian gunmen discussing Isaac Bashevis Singer stories while the Serbs sporadically sprayed sniper fire on Croats below.  (Mr. Horwitz, now a fulltime author on leave from the New Yorker,  got his story; it was impossible to tell whether the Serbs got any of their targets.)

       Adventure, pathos, humor, irony—this is the stuff of storytelling and the elixir of storytellers. If the Wall Street Journal were a house, the A-hed would surely be our front porch--a place where stories are spun out with a kind of spare exuberance, for an audience of clever listeners.

       So pull up a chair and enjoy!

       --Ken Wells, senior editor and writer, Page One—2002

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