Wall Street Journal adds people index

The Wall Street Journal began a people index in today’s newspaper. Like its popular company index, which tells readers what page a company is mentioned on in that day’s newspaper, the people index will tell readers when prominent people are mentioned in stories.

The New York Times’ Katherine Seelye covered the change in today’s paper and writes, “The index to people will appear inside the back cover of the Marketplace section on an expanded ‘Who’s News’ page with a daily feature on an executive or business leader. (The current index to companies will stay inside the front cover of Marketplace.) Publishing consultants say that readers like such navigational tools, and many newspapers are making increasing use of them, sometimes on their front pages.”

That said, this new wrinkle to the WSJ is not a new thing in business journalism. Many of the weekly business newspapers have had people indexes for years.

Here is the paper’s press release announcing the index and other changes.