During more than three decades with Dow Jones, Donald Macdonald set the modern marketing and sales strategy for its flagship publication, The Wall Street Journal. Macdonald is the strategist who demonstrated that a national audience and national market truly could be knit together every business day. He later went on to lead The Journal on new challenges in Asia and Europe, turning a national business daily into a global publication.
Macdonald has been a fighter for the values and standards of his publications and his profession. At Dow Jones, he was revered for all the advertising he has brought in, and for the advertising he has kept out. Never did he lack the strength to say no. Macdonald also fought from Madison Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue in defense of press freedoms and against legislation or regulation that could hamper the effectiveness of advertising.
As chairman of the joint commission of the Advertising Federation of America and the Advertising Association of the West, Macdonald became the first chairman of the new American Advertising Federation, overseeing some 180 ad clubs and 30,000 members.
In 1994 Macdonald authored, "Arrows in Your Quiver: A Career in Advertising."