As of 2013, the economy of the San Juans is almost entirely driven by tourism, which has been described as a "thin base for newspaper endeavors.

[3] Wall relocated to Friday Harbor from Lanesboro, Minnesota, where he had published a newspaper and, from 1878 to 1885, served on the village council.

[4] Originally named the Friday Harbor Journal,[5][2] Wall launched the newspaper with a stated ambition of helping the thinly populated San Juan archipelago to improve beyond a largely farming- and fishing-based economy.

The Journal was bought in 1907 by its editor, Virgil Frits (1882-1971), who owned, edited and published it until 1958 (Wall died in Friday Harbor on Aug. 16, 1911 at the age of 67 [6]).

At that time, The Journal was part of Lower Mainland Publishing Co., a subsidiary of Hollinger International, which Conrad Black and his associate David Radler controlled.

Black and Radler arranged for Hollinger to sell The Journal and the Skagit Valley Argus, on May 1, 2000, to Horizon Publications, a company which they secretly owned, for the sum of $1.

Between 1999 and 2011, The Journal regularly won awards for General Excellence and Community Service in the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association Better Newspapers Contest; in 2003, it won first place for General Excellence and first and third place for Community Service.

The online news site was founded by two former Journal employees, Sharon Kivisto and Matt Pranger.

An extra was produced on May 9, 2002, when a devastating fire consumed nearly an entire block of downtown Friday Harbor; the edition also provided information on how residents could help in the recovery effort.