“Serve It Up Hot and Brief”: The Journalistic Innovations and Influence of Willard M. Kiplinger

Abstract

The newsletter format has witnessed a popular resurgence in digital media but little is known about the origins of this multi-billion dollar industry for specialized information. Newsletter industry pioneer Willard M. Kiplinger, whose Kiplinger Washington Letter claims to be the oldest continuously published newsletter in the US, perfected a type of reporting that influenced publications ranging from Newsweek to U.S. News & World Report, Bloomberg, Axios, and others. The Kiplinger Washington Letter was influential during the New Deal, with Kiplinger serving as a crucial bridge between conservative business leaders and New Deal regulators. Kiplinger’s weekly newsletter nurtured a close reader engagement through a specialized research service and extensive correspondence with his subscribers, a type of early crowdsourcing that anticipated the active audience interaction in digital journalism.

Notes

1 W. M. Kiplinger, “W.M.K. Autobiography, unpublished,” (Washington, D.C, 1960), Ch. 3, 18–24, Kiplinger Personal Papers (henceforth KPP), Seneca, MD.

2 John Hazard, “Hazard Draft - KWE History, unpublished,” (Washington, D.C., May 1978), in possession of the author, Ch. 13, 7.

3 “Who We Are, W.M. Kiplinger, Program Founder,” Kiplinger Programs, http://www.kiplingerprogram.org/kiplinger/about_us.html.

4 “It Started With Kip,” Newsweek, August 21, 1967.

5 “Who we are, W.M. Kiplinger, Program Founder.”

6 “W.M.K. Autobiography, unpublished,” Ch. 1, 2.

7 Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” The Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (June 1974): 116–40; Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 319; Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

8 Kathleen Endres, “Newsletters, Newspapers Pamphlets,” in Journalism and Mass Communication, vol. 1, Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (New York: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2008), 90.

9 Matt Kinsman, “Revenue Up 5.4% for B2B Media & Information Industry in 2017.” SIIA, August 30, 2018. https://www.siia.net/blog/index/Post/76816/Revenue-Up-5-4-for-B2B-Media-Information-Industry-in-2017.

10 The 2017 combined annual revenue for Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox Business and Bloomberg was $6.29 billion. Pew Research Center Journalism & Media. “Cable News Fact Sheet,” June 25, 2019. https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/cable-news/. Ad spending for morning and evening network news: $1.64 billion. Pew Research Center Journalism & Media. “Network News Fact Sheet,” June 25, 2019. https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/network-news/.

11 Sarah Perez, “The Skimm Closes Its $12M Series C with Big Names Shonda Rhimes and Tyra Banks on Board,” Tech Crunch, May 21, 2018. https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/theskimm-closes-its-12m-series-c-with-big-names-shonda-rhimes-and-tyra-banks-on-board/.

12 Cory Schouten, “(News) Letter Perfect,” Quill, Spring 2020. Quillmag.com.

13 Knight Kiplinger, telephone interview with Rob Wells, May 29, 2020. Overall, the employment drop was more severe when comparing the parent company and not just the publishing operations between these two time periods. The company employed 109 people and generated $23 million in revenue in 2017, down from $90 million in revenue and 836 employees in 1986. The steep employment drop was because the 1986 employment figures reflected printing subsidiaries that were later sold. “The Kiplinger Washington Editors Inc Private Company Profile,” Standard & Poor’s Net Advantage, 2019. https://www-capitaliq-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/CIQDotNet/company.aspx?companyId=7755419. The 1986 data is from Sandra Sugawara, “Kiplinger’s Formula Stays in Place Despite Changing Times,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1987. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-22-fi-5234-story.html.

14 “Kip Dies - An Assessment - A Tribute,” The Newsletter on Newsletters, August 1967.

15 Kiplinger, A. (1967, August 9). To: All Members (Kiplinger obituary). https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/w-m-kiplinger/

16 Kiplinger, 2019.

17 “United States World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918,” National Archives and Records Administration, June 5, 1917. District of Columbia, no 10;  image 2805 of 5802.

18 Knight Kiplinger, telephone interview with Rob Wells, July 12, 2019.

19 “W.M. Kiplinger Autobiography, unpublished,” Ch. 3, unnumbered page.

20 “W.M. Kiplinger Is Dead at 76; Created Capital News Letter,” New York Times, August 7, 1967. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/08/07/90388704.pdf; and “Who We Are, W.M. Kiplinger, Program Founder.”

21 Hazard, 1978.

22 See, “Who we are, W.M. Kiplinger, Program Founder”; Hazard, 1978.

23 Austin Kiplinger and Knight Kiplinger, “70 Years of Looking Ahead,” Kiplinger’s Looking Ahead: 70 Years of Forecasts from The Kiplinger Washington Letter, ix–xvii. The Kiplinger Washington Editors Inc., 1993, x.

24 “W.M.  Kiplinger Is Dead at 76; Created Capital News Letter,” New York Times, August 7, 1967. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/08/07/90388704.pdf.

25 Kiplinger, 70 Years, xi.

26 “W.M. Kiplinger Is Dead at 76.”

27 Howard Penn Hudson, Publishing Newsletters, 3rd ed. (Rhinebeck, NY: H&M Publishers, 1997) 1.

28 Hazard, Ch. 11, unnumbered.

29 “It Started With Kip,” Newsweek.

30 Kenneth Crawford, “What to Tell You About Kiplinger,” Saturday Evening Post, January 25, 1947.

31 Kiplinger, telephone interview, July 12, 2019.

32 Hudson, 1997, 1.

33 Endres, 2008.

34 Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters, National Mail Order Association, LLC, n.d. http://www.nmoa.org/catalog/newsletter_dir.asp. Endres estimated some ten thousand subscription newsletters, of which more than two-thirds of those had been started in the 1980s. Endres, “Newsletters, Newspapers Pamphlets.”

35 Hudson, x. A 2013 survey of thirteen hundred investment newsletters estimated they received $3.4 billion in revenues. See Scott Brown, Jose Cao-Alvira, and Eric Powers, “Do Investment Newsletters Move Markets?” Financial Management 42, no. 2 (2013): 318.

36 Endres, 2008, 90.

37 Endres, 90.

38 Jesse H. Neal, “A Review of Business Paper History,” in N.W. Ayer & Son Annual and Directory, 1:1245, Philadelphia, 1922.

39 Ferdinand Lundberg, “News-Letters: A Revolution in Journalism,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1940, 464. Lundberg also noted newsletters supply information for “class conscious businessmen” who can afford to pay for the low down, 466.

40 Lundberg, 465; Hudson, 2.

41 Lundberg, 465.

42 Hudson, 6.

43 Hazard, 40.

44 By 1940, Whaley-Eaton, Kiplinger and the Research Institute controlled 90 percent of the circulation for business newsletters, Lundberg, 466.

45 Lundberg, 464.

46 The National Thrift News and others branched out into related fields. See Rob Wells, The Enforcers: How Little-Known Trade Reporters Exposed the Keating Five and Advanced Business Journalism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

47 W. M. Kiplinger Autobiography, Ch. 3, p. 24.

48 Richard John, “Introduction. Adversarial Relations? Business and Politics in Twentieth- Century America,” in Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America, edited by Richard John and Kim Phillips-Fein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 20.

49 Galambos and Pratt, 92.

50 Ibid., 44.

51 John, 2017, 15. See also, Herman Krooss and Charles Gilbert, American Business History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 256. The rise of trade associations “intentionally or unintentionally were designed to circumvent the Sherman Act by restricting competition.” Also, Sawyer writes that during and after World War I, trade associations such as the US Chamber of Commerce “became an embedded intermediary capable of coordinating business practices and regulatory prerogatives.” Laura Phillips Sawyer, “Trade Associations, State Building, and the Sherman Act: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1912–25,” in Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America, edited by Richard R. John and Kim Phillips-Fein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 42.

52 Galambos and Pratt, 93

53 Kiplinger and the New York Times coverage in 1932 used this term to describe business executives’ anxiety over the New Deal regulations. See New York Times, February 22, 1933; The Kiplinger Washington Letter, April 15, 1933.

54 Fred Seaton Siebert, Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 73.

55 Lundberg, 469.

56 Kathy Roberts Forde and Katherine A. Foss, “‘The Facts—The Color!—The Facts’: The Idea of a Report in American Print Culture, 1885–1910,” Book History 15 (2012): 126.

57 Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism – A History: 1690–1960, 3rd ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1966), 732.

58 James D. Startt and William David Sloan, Historical Methods in Mass Communication (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2003), 40.

59 W.M. Kiplinger Autobiography, Ch. 1, 6.

60 Wayne Parsons, The Power of the Financial Press (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 25.

61 W.M.K. Autobiography; Hazard, 1978.

62 Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1975), 6.

63 Sawyer, “Trade Associations, State Building, and the Sherman Act,” 33.

64 Herbert Hoover, “Letter to Kiplinger,” August 22, 1942, KPP.

65 “The Kiplinger Washington Letter,” The Kiplinger Washington Letter, July 12, 1930.

66 “The Kiplinger Washington Letter,” July 12, 1930.

67 Herbert Hoover, “Letter to Willard M. Kiplinger,” July 14, 1930, Herbert Hoover Papers Post Presidential Correspondence, Box 167: Kiplinger, Willard M. 1930–33, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum (henceforth HHPLM), West Branch, IA.

68 W.M. Kiplinger, “Letter to Herbert Hoover,” July 15, 1930, Herbert Hoover Papers Post Presidential Correspondence, Box 167: Kiplinger, Willard M. 1930–33, HHPLM.

69 “The Kiplinger Washington Letter,” The Kiplinger Washington Letter, July 19, 1930. Herbert Hoover Papers Post Presidential Correspondence, Box 167: Kiplinger, Willard M. 1930–33, HHPLM.

70 “The Kiplinger Washington Letter,” November 22, 1930.

71 Ibid.

72 W.M. Kiplinger, “Letter to Herbert Hoover,” February 27, 1933, KPP.

73 Herbert Hoover, “Letter to Willard M. Kiplinger,” February 28, 1933, KPP.

74 W.M. Kiplinger, “Letter to Herbert Hoover,” March 18, 1933, Herbert Hoover Papers Post Presidential Correspondence, Box 112: Kiplinger, Willard M. 1933–1961, HHPLM.

75 The Associated Press, “Raymond Moley, Roosevelt Aide, Dies; Brain Trust Leader Coined ‘New Deal’,” New York Times, February 19, 1975.

76 “Roosevelt Aide,” New York Times.

77 Raymond Moley, “A Journalist’s Journalist,” Ohio News, August 21, 1967.

78 W.M. Kiplinger, Autobiography, Ch. 12, 154.

79 W.M. Kiplinger, “Letter to Professor Raymond Moley,” December 7, 1932, Box 28, Folder 16, Raymond Moley Papers (henceforth RMP), Hoover Institution Archives (henceforth HIA), Stanford University, Stanford, California.

80 Raymond Moley, “Letter to Willard M. Kiplinger,” December 6, 1932, Box 28, Folder 16, RMP, HIA.

81 See Gerald Berk, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900–1932 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 138; Bruce Allen Murphy, The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 343.

82 Sawyer, 2017, 32.

83 W.M. Kiplinger “Letter to Herbert Hoover,” July 10, 1936, Herbert Hoover Papers Post Presidential Correspondence, HHPL.

84 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Letter to Willard M Kiplinger,” November 6, 1931, Letters from Prominent Men, KPP.

85 Cordell Hull, “Letter to Kiplinger,” March 21, 1933, KPP.

86 Hubert H. Humphrey, “Letter to Kiplinger,” July 21, 1964, KPP.

87 Kiplinger in a 1949 New York Times article, as cited by “The TJFR Group/MasterCard International Business News Luminaries of the Century,” TJFR Business News Reporter, 2000.

88 Lundberg, 470.

89 Kiplinger, October 11, 2019, telephone interview. The Beige Book is a periodic survey of regional economic conditions compiled by the twelve Federal Reserve district banks that involves conversations with local business leaders.

90 https://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html.

91 Ibid.

92 “The Kiplinger Washington Letter,” Kiplinger Washington Letter, August 2, 1930. Herbert Hoover Papers Post Presidential Correspondence, Box 167: Kiplinger, Willard M. 1930–33, HHPL.

93 Philip Napoli, Audience Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

94 Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 16.

95 Stanley J. Baran and Dennis K. Davis, Mass Communication Theory, 7th ed. (Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2015), 200.

96 Knight Kiplinger, telephone interview with Rob Wells, October 11, 2019.

97 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Letter to Willard M. Kiplinger,” July 8, 1931, Letters from Prominent Men, KPP.

98 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Letter to Willard M. Kiplinger,” November 6, 1931, Letters from Prominent Men, KPP.

99 Evert Volkersz, “McBook: The Reader’s Digest Condensed Books Franchise,” Publishing Research Quarterly 11, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 52.

100 “KWL Milestones,” est. 1963, KPP.

101 New York Times, 1967.

102 Joel Whitaker, Telephone interview with Joel Whitaker, February 14, 2020.

103 “W.M. Kiplinger, Autobiography, unpublished.”

104 TJFR Business News Reporter, 2000.

105 Hudson, 2.

106 A 1940 Harper’s article about the newsletter industry cited other notable publications as Congressional Intelligence, Manufacturers News Letter; the Labor Letter produced by Chester Wright; a newsletter produced by the Babson financial service; a newsletter produced by David Lawrence; Week by Week by Frankling Roudybush; the Weekly Foreign Letter by investment banker Lawrence Dennis; and The Insider by Johannes Steel and Charles Hedges; Lundberg, 466.

107 Austin Kiplinger, ed., Every Monday Morning for Sixty Years: The Past Sixty Years as Reporter in the Kiplinger Washington Letters (Washington, D.C.: The Kiplinger Washington Editors Inc., 1983), 23.

108 “W.M. Kiplinger is Dead,” 1967.

109 Janell Sims, “Bloomberg’s Exec. Editor Focused on Transparency in Financial Reporting,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Policy, October 1, 2013. https://shorensteincenter.org/laurie-hays/. Also see “Attribution,” in The Associated Press Stylebook (New York: Basic Books, 2020). https://www.apstylebook.com/ap_stylebook/attribution.

110 “Lessons of Leadership- Part XV- Keeping an Eye on Washington: A Conversation with Willard M. Kiplinger, the Publisher of the Famed Washington Newsletter,” Nation’s Business, August 1966, 68.

111 “Kip Dies,” The Newsletter on Newsletters, August 1967.

112 Moley, 1967.

113 “It Started With Kip,” Newsweek, August 21, 1967.

114 “W.M.K. Autobiography, unpublished,” Ch. 4, 29.

115 “The TJFR Group / MasterCard International Business News Luminaries of the Century.” TJFR Business News Reporter, 2000, 43.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rob Wells

Rob Wells is an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the School of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Arkansas. He teaches data journalism, journalism theory, business reporting and basic news reporting. His research interests involve examining the history of business journalism and its problems, such as business journalism’s inability to serve the general public effectively. He is author of The Enforcers: How Little-Known Trade Reporters Exposed the Keating Five and Advanced Business Journalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019), which uses a case study of media coverage of the savings and loan industry to examine problems with business journalism and describes ways it can improve.