Institutional Investor founder Kaplan dies at 74

Gilbert Kaplan, founder and longtime chief executive of Institutional Investor, a monthly magazine for pension fund and asset managers, died at the age of 74.

Margalit Fox of the New York Times writes, “He soon became conscious of the importance of money managers in financial markets — and of a gap in the marketplace when it came to meeting their needs.

“‘They were professional investors,’ Mr. Kaplan told The Sunday Times of London in 1984. ‘Here was a group of people who had no information about their field — and an audience that advertisers wanted to reach in a major way.’

“Scraping together $150,000 — two-thirds of it borrowed from Gerald Bronfman, whose family owned the Seagram distilling company — he put out the first issue of The Institutional Investor, as it was originally known, in March 1967.

“Mr. Kaplan, who also held the title of editor in chief, appointed the financial journalist George J. W. Goodman, better known by the pseudonym Adam Smith, as the magazine’s inaugural editor. After selling the company in 1984 to Capital Cities Communications, he stayed on until 1992 as Institutional Investor’s editor in chief.”

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