Knight Kiplinger looks back at the company his grandfather started 100 years ago with the Kiplinger Letter.
Kiplinger writes, “In 1923, my grandfather W.M. Kiplinger, a 32-year-old former Associated Press reporter in Washington, thought that people in management were overwhelmed with too much information that was hard to make sense of. He felt they needed concise, objective and practical information about what lay ahead in the economy, government regulation, politics, technology and investing. He summarized his forecasts in a tightly written, four-page weekly bulletin, and he offered his readers more information on any item they wanted to know more about.
“There were other newsletters before Kiplinger’s, but he used a unique new style: terse, colloquial writing that saved the reader’s valuable time. He also was a pioneer in using unnamed — but highly reliable — government sources to provide readers with information they couldn’t find elsewhere. These innovations were years ahead of their time. In a recent book by journalism professor Rob Wells (The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street), Wells says that techniques W.M. Kiplinger used in the 1930s were forerunners of today’s business and government reporting in the likes of Politico, Axios and digital newsletters from major publishers.”
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