Wall Street Journal Debuts Dedicated Bitcoin Coverage

Author:: Cathy Reisenwitz
Publish date:: Feb 5, 2014

When a venerated institution such as The Wall Street Journal dedicates a new section to covering bitcoin, you know an idea has hit the mainstream. Announced today, BitBeat: Your Daily Bitcoin Round-Up will aggregate news stories related to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies the WSJ thinks its readers will find important.

We are launching a new feature here at MoneyBeat: BitBeat, a daily round-up of bitcoin news, notes, and thoughts. The crypto-currency had a hectic 2013, and the new year is already shaping up as a manic one as well. So far, there has been a high-profile hearing on bitcoin’s future, and a high-profile arrest of a bitcoin apostle, and while the price has been stable so far, another wild rally, or brutal sell-off, could come at any moment. We’ll do our best to keep you up to date on all the happenings as bitcoin goes through what many expect to be an important year.

The first piece of news? Bitcoin’s latest price, obtained via CoinDesk.

Veteran reporter Paul Vigna is bringing 16 years of experience covering the financial world to the page, and hopes to update it daily. He describes it as a place for “stuff we don’t have time to turn into stories we can make quick reference to.”

So far all the stories are from the newspaper itself or CoinDesk.

“I started writing about [bitcoin] in the spring,” Vigna said. “I just got interested in it so we started doing it. With the volume of things people send me, it just struck me over the head that we should do a roundup.”

The Wall Street Journal joins Forbes in having a dedicated page for bitcoin coverage. Interestingly, despite featuring literally thousands of topics, the New York Times topic pages do not include bitcoin or cryptocurrency.

“The fact that I’m writing about it shows that I think it’s an important development,” Vigna said. “I don’t know where it’s going to go. As a writer I think it’s a really interesting development, an interesting story. I think this is going to be a pretty interesting year for it. So that’s why we’re doing this.”