Celebrating 100 Years of The Kiplinger Letter

As a reader of the personal finance advice in this magazine and at Kiplinger.com, you probably know our long Kiplinger tradition of accuracy, clear writing and, above all, utility — practical information to help you live better.

When this magazine was founded more than 75 years ago, it followed in the footsteps of its famous big brother, The Kiplinger Letter, which for 25 years had been providing advice to clients for managing their businesses and professional affairs. The Kiplinger Magazine, launched in 1947, was designed to give people advice on man-aging their personal affairs, especially their household budgets, taxes and investments. It was a pioneer of today’s personal finance journalism.

This fall marks the 100th anniversary of The Kiplinger Letter, the oldest and still most widely read business newsletter in the world. Thousands of men and women rely on the Letter for forecasts and advice to help them manage their enterprises and their personal investments. I, in the third generation of journalist Kiplingers, am honored to serve as editor emeritus of the Letter and this magazine. 

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An Innovative Approach 

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. 

Impartial Advice 

 It’s no mean feat for a paid-circulation publication to survive and thrive for a century, and The Kiplinger Letter has done it by sticking to its core values. Our small staff of savvy reporters and editors provide forecasts that are nonpartisan and devoid of wishful thinking.

We know that some of our readers are rooting for the outcomes we foresee, while others will view them as anathema. But we call the shots as we see them. That’s the only way we know how to be useful to our readers, who must make decisions based on likely outcomes, whether they want them or not. 

We’ve done this through times of bitter acrimony in public affairs — the tumultuous 1930s, 1960s and today, when there is a degree of political polarization not seen in America since the 19th century. We never take sides, hewing to our mission of unbiased analysis and judgment. 

Most of our readers get this and appreciate it. Even with an ocean of free information on the internet, they pay for our independent journalism through subscriptions to our flagship weekly letter and our biweekly Kiplinger Tax Letter, the most widely read tax advisory service. The high renewal rates are an annual referendum on how useful our readers find them to be. 

We’re honored that many of our Kiplinger clients subscribe to several of our publications, whether the weekly letter, tax letter, this magazine, Kiplinger Retirement Report or Kiplinger Investing for Income. These all share the same editorial culture that started 100 years ago and lives on today. It’s our pleasure to serve you. 

Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, a monthly, trustworthy source of advice and guidance. Subscribe to help you make more money and keep more of the money you make here.