Informal Notes on the Wall Street Journal Format The material includes copyrighted stories from the Wall Street Journal, mostly from years 1987 and 1988, but also some from 1989 and has been provided courtesy of Dow Jones Information Services. The data has been changed to standard SGML format, as shown below. WSJ870924-0053 Service Tax Cited
09/24/87
WALL STREET JOURNAL (J) BOND MARKET NEWS (BON) NEW YORK Standard & Poor's Corp. said it placed the state of Florida's double-A-rated debt on its CreditWatch list "with negative implications." S&P cited uncertainty over the fate of the state's new tax on services. S&P said the move involves $4 billion of debt as well as $260 million of university general obligation debt and state contractual debt. "At issue is whether or not the state can secure a sound financial position, by addressing on a timely basis any budgetary gap that may arise as a result of any changes in its major revenue sources," S&P said. Florida Budget Director Glenn Robertson said the state hadn't expected S&P's action. "I had the impression that there was nothing imminent," he said. Mr. Robertson said the move wouldn't have any immediate effect on the state's financial situation, since it doesn't have any plans to issue bonds. Nonetheless, the move will likely further complicate the already chaotic debate over Gov. Bob Martinez's proposal to kill the services tax. A special legislative session called to decide the tax's fate ended Tuesday with no action. Lawmakers were divided over several options: to repeal the tax and replace it with another tax; to repeal it without replacing it; or to revise it to make it more popular. The tax, the most sweeping levy of its kind ever implemented by a state, took effect in July. It extends the state's 5% sales tax to a variety of services, such as pest control and advertising. Gov. Martinez originally supported the tax as a way to help meet Florida's growing revenue needs. But he switched positions last week, citing the tax's unpopularity. Florida's problems with the tax have been seen as a troublesome sign for other revenue-needy states looking for ways to broaden their tax bases. The Legislature is expected to reconvene Monday to continue to debate the tax. Each document contains the DOC, DOCNO, and TEXT fields, with different possible additional fields between the DOCNO and the TEXT markers. The extra white space varies across documents, and the TEXT fields may contain blank lines or no lines. The fields between the DOCNO and TEXT markers vary across years, as the fields from the original data varied across years. The codes for these fields have been taken from the original data, and are fairly transparent in meaning. Often fields may be missing or may contain additional "noise". HL -- headline, but can contain multiple lines including the writer, or other information DD -- story date SO -- story source, usually Wall Street Journal IN -- manually-assigned codes for categories DATELINE -- normally contains the location filing the story. This field sometimes has very unexpected contents. LP -- sometimes used to mark off lead paragraph other codes CO -- manually-assigned codes for companies or other organizations G,GV -- manually-assigned codes for the government agency involved AUTHOR -- author of the story AN -- identification code for story (1989 only) RE -- manually-assigned codes for regions involved in stories MS, NS -- manually-assigned indexing codes DOCID -- Document ID DATE DO ST In general the punctuation (>, < etc.) has been left as is rather than converted to SGML code, with the exception of the "&" symbol, which was changed to the entity "&". The '@' sign replaces a null byte which seems to be used as a line-break character in the data.