A brief look at the Kiplinger company, 1920-2007.

Knight's grandfather Willard Kiplinger founded the firm in 1920. They did custom research for business clients. The newsletter began in 1923 as a periodic report to all clients. They didn't charge for it at first and it was well into the '30s before it became "the tail that wagged the dog" for the company.

Certainly for a half-century at least The Kiplinger Letter was the best-known newsletter in the U.S. Knight Kiplinger is the 3rd generation to head the company. "My father [Austin] is still very active at 88, serves as chairman." After a period in newspapers, Knight joined the firm in 1983 and became president, "I should remember this ... around 1993."

"Response to direct mail has been declining for decades," Knight observes, "If any old-timers were still around they'd say we've never again seen response rates like the '40s ... when prospects just didn't get much direct mail."

"The good old days"

Kiplinger has always been on the leading edge in marketing. "We were the first sponsor for The Today Show in 1952," Knight comments. "It was before credit cards and 800 numbers. Viewers had to copy down an address from the screen and mail an order." (Being of a certain age, I can picture J. Fred Muggs holding up a copy of the letter.)

"When CNN came online in 1977 people asked, 'What kind of people would watch news at 2 in the afternoon? We thought they sounded like our subscribers and Kiplinger was their largest advertiser in the first year. Today TV is too expensive. No publisher can afford it."

Kiplinger is now experimenting with e-mail marketing. "It's been difficult for us," Knight says, "because our subject areas are so broad. I think e-mail offers may work best for very tight niche marketers."

Tradition

I told Knight that my father subscribed in the '50s. "He'd certainly recognize it today," Knight says. "Still 4 pages, still the traditional Kiplinger letter-format style. We've added a small vertical visual at the top right of page 1 and minimal use of color, but basically it's the same.

"The Kiplinger Letter has always been strictly nonpartisan, but I can tell from the mail I get that many readers transfer their own biases onto what we write."

For many years the Kiplinger Washington Letter claimed to be the largest circulation newsletter in the U.S.--until phenomena of the '80s like the Cal-Berkeley Wellness Letter and Contest News-letter, which cracked the 1 million circulation level. Today, with the hard offers and higher prices, Kiplinger describes their circulation as "tens of thousands" rather than "hundreds of thousands."

"Letter" rather than "newsletter"

"Like my father, I call our products 'letters.' They aren't 'newsletters' because they don't contain 'news.' 'News' is instant history, things that have already happened. We publish analysis and forecasts."