‘Coffee weak on profit-taking’ People used to say that if God did not like The Journal of Commerce, He never would have invented commodities trading. For much of its history, commodities were a staple of Journal of Commerce coverage. Wheat, soybeans, potatoes, wool, cocoa, coffee, sugar, beef, wool, burlap, linseed oil, pork bellies — voluminous data about these and dozens of other commodities were reported in each day’s edition of The Journal of Commerce. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, circa 1956. Columns of statistics on prices and trading volume accompanied daily articles reporting market developments (headlines from a typical edition in the 1950s: “Cocoa prices drift lower;” “Most grains close mixed; lard higher;” “Coffee weak on profit-taking”). The Journal of Commerce’s interest in commodities came naturally. The paper grew up with the basic industries, including food, chemicals, oil, textiles and metals. It expanded into related fields, such as liquor and groceries, both of which were featured in regular sections as late as the early 1960s. Alan Greenspan watches the JoC-ECRI Industrial Price Index. Over the years, the JoC became the standard source of daily information for commodities. In some industries, contracts were based on prices quoted in The Journal of Commerce. Most commodity price information now is disseminated electronically instead of on newsprint. The JoC had a hand in this transition following its acquisition in 1961 of the fledgling Commodity News Service, now owned by Knight-Ridder. The JoC’s petroleum-price reporting lives on in the daily JoC Oil Price Daily, an e-mail and fax report covering heating oil, bunker fuel and other petroleum grades not quoted on commodity exchanges. Another vestige of the JoC’s commodities-reporting heritage is the JoC-ECRI Industrial Price Index. Created in the mid-1980s and updated in the late 1990s by the New York-based Economic Cycle Research Institute, the index uses prices of industrial commodities such as textiles, metals and petroleum to predict changes in global business cycles before they are seen in the economy. The index has developed a strong and loyal following of economists, including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

The paper also began publishing on the West Coast so the growing readership there could receive the paper on the day of publication. It also began to print in color. In 1990 it moved its headquarters from 110 Wall St. into Two World Trade Center.

The JoC never missed a day of publication, even on the day in February 1993, when terrorists detonated a bomb in the garage under the World Trade Center, killing six people. The paper’s New York staff managed to find its way down the darkened, smoke-filled fire stairs of the tower to safety below. The staff at the Phillipsburg printing plant put the paper out that day.

Times were changing again. The shipping industry, which had flourished through the 1960s and 1970s, began a period of consolidation in the mid-1990s due to plunging freight rates. Separate shipping companies that had run multiple shipcard ads in the paper merged and eliminated competing routes. With the rapid growth of the Internet in the 1990s, many shipping companies began to switch their ship schedules onto their websites, where shippers around the world could access them.

Knight-Ridder decided to get out of business information altogether to focus on its daily metropolitan newspapers. In 1995, it sold the JoC Group to the Economist Group of London. Under the Economist, the JoC tightened its focus to cover international trade logistics. In 1999 the broadsheet newspaper was converted to a tabloid newspaper format.

But in the Internet age, it became increasingly apparent that a print newspaper with a worldwide readership faced a struggle in keeping its readers up to date on breaking news. By the time the newspaper was delivered, most readers had already gotten their news by fax, telephone or on the Internet. So the JoC decided to switch all of its breaking news over to its subscription-only website, www.joc.online.

In 2000 it converted the its daily print publication into a weekly magazine, JoC Week, which provided analysis of trade logistics.

In 2001 the Economist sold the JoC to Commonwealth Business Media, the New Jersey-based publisher of Pacific Shipper, Canadian Sailings, and a number of railroad and trucking directories. Commonwealth is headed by Chairman and Chief Executive Alan Glass.

The new owners have longstanding connections with the transportation industry, having previously owned Traffic World, another magazine acquired with its purchase of the JoC Group. Commonwealth publishes The Pocket List of Railroad Officials, the U.S. Custom House Guide and Official Export Guide, The Forwarders List of Attorneys, The American Motor Carrier Directory and The Warehousing/ Distribution Directory.