This weekend, on Saturday, after months of anticipation, WSJ. will arrive on the doorsteps of Wall Street Journal subscribers in the U.S., and in Europe and Asia tomorrow, its pages brimming with advice on how to live the good life and ads for luxury goods of the sort that life calls for.

On the face of it, WSJ.--note the period following the J--would seem the perfect match of the right readers with the right advertisers, and that’s how the Journal folks pitched WSJ. in unveiling the first issue of the quarterly yesterday in New York.

In the U.S., 800,000 copies of the magazine both in subscribers' Saturday Weekend edition, and it will be included in papers sold on newsstands in those markets as well. That’s a bit less than half of the newspaper’s roughly 1.7 million U.S. print circulation.

The average household income of WSJ. readers in the U.S. will be $265,000. The gender breakdown will be 60/40 male to female versus 70/30 for the paper.

In Europe and Asia the magazine will be distributed in all 160,000 copies of the paper.

The first issue of WSJ. carries 104 pages in the U.S. edition and 80 in the European edition. Of the 51 advertisers, 19 are new to the Journal.

WSJ. will come out once a quarter until mid-2009 when it will move to a monthly frequency.

WSJ.'s publisher is Ellen Asmodeo-Giglio, a former senior vice president and publisher of Travel & Leisure Magazine. Its editor is Tina Gaudoin, who has recently headed the London Times’ Luxx magazine, and she's filled the first issue with articles on cars, fashion, philanthropy and personalities.

Working in favor of WSJ. is the might of Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s new chieftain, who’s committed to broadening the appeal of the business daily to a wider consumer audience, and WSJ. fits right in with that goal.

WSJ. also has the global presence of both Dow Jones and Murdoch's publishing empire, both of which span the globe.

But all that said, WSJ. is no sure slam dunk as a new publication. Though it's got a built-in circulation, it will be facing stiff competition in the ad marketplace.

With business advertising shrinking for print publications in recent years, more and more publications have refocused on attracting the same high-end advertisers WSJ. is after, including its parent newspaper.

There’s also been a handful of new launches, most notably Conde Nast’s Portfolio, and that publication has the enormous advantage of coming out of a publishing house that specializes in high-end consumer advertising.

In Europe, WSJ. will compete with How to Spend it, launched by The Financial Times, and new publication from the International Herald Tribune, called International T: Magazine, a spinoff of T, the luxury magazine published by its U.S. parent, The New York Times, among other high-end titles

Another factor working against WSJ. is that in this near-recession, luxury advertisers are also feeling the pinch, and more so than in previous slowdowns.

Conventional wisdom holds that high-end consumers continue to spend during hard times, even as everyone else cuts back, and that's been true in past slowdowns.

But these days the hurt is being felt higher up the wealth ladder, say experts, the result of the housing crunch and the roiling stock market.

“If you’re a high-end consumer and your investments aren’t shrinking you don’t feel so bad. But in this economic downturn the market is underperforming,” Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group in Charleston, S.C., told Media Life’s Media Economy newsletter.

“So if you’re in the top 15 percent of consumers, you’re feeling the pain. Only the top 1.5 percent, according to our research, has been unscathed by this economic downturn. Those are the ultra-rich consumers.”