The Gap Filler

As founder of the weekly Kiplinger Washington Letter, Willard Monroe Kiplinger, 62, has built up a $4,400,000-a-year business by "filling gaps" in news reporting. Besides the Washington Letter, "Circulated Privately to Businessmen" (at $18 a year). Kiplinger and his staff turn out a fortnightly tax letter, a fortnightly farm letter, a monthly magazine Changing Times. Last week Kiplinger began filling a fifth gap. "Kip" had discovered that Europe gravely misunderstands U.S. economics, politics, and motives. His answer: a new newsletter. Overseas Postscript, to "explain U.S. trends to foreign businessmen."

Kiplinger's letter-writing style has nothing in common with Lord Chesterfield's. Like the other Kiplinger letters, the first issue of Overseas Postscript was composed in punchy, prophetic telegraphese. Sample topics: effect of a Korean truce on U.S. output (no "sharp recession, only a wiggle" downward), cuts in foreign aid. immigration quotas, book-burning ("The State Department is ashamed . . ."). Kiplinger, who thinks a newsletter should be a two-way affair, hopes to pick topics for later letters from reader requests for information.

Damage Repaired. Kiplinger's energetic coverage of the news has not always brought the rewards he expected. The day after Harry Truman's victory in the 1948 election, Kip's Changing Times was in the mail with a cover story entitled "What Will Dewey Do?" and blaring its "beat" in full-page ads (TIME, Nov. 8, 1948 et seq.). This massive blooper sent the circulation of all the Kiplinger publications plummeting. With characteristic candor, Kip admitted that "I made the mistake." With equally characteristic vigor (staffers estimate that he works as much as 70 or 80 hours a week), Kip set out to repair the damage. Today a new, ten-story office building in Washington houses the Kiplinger publications and a staff of 315. Changing Times has climbed to an estimated circulation of 225,000, the Washington Letter to about 200,000, the tax and farm letters to 10,000 apiece.

Readers of Kip's crackling Washington Letter remember the information he passes along, tend to forget the tips and predictions that do not pan out. He consciously styles the letters to make readers feel that they are on a private pipeline to the best-informed Government sources ("Officials aren't worried about deflation, think they can stop it . . ."). Kiplinger writes every line of the Washington Letter himself, sometimes rewrites an item a dozen times to produce what he calls "sweep lines," i.e., sentences that have a single thought to a line, and that end with a punctuation mark at the right-hand margin.

The Trend Sin. Kip himself concentrates on the "Wash Letter," lets his staffers put out the other publications, but peppers them with such marginal comments on their handiwork as "Does it have any 'so what'?" and "What do I care?" Kiplinger's 21 editors (who include his wife) get from $10,000 to $30,000 a year (plus bonuses), often vacation at Kiplinger's $100,000 Florida home. In Washington, Kiplinger reporters stay away from press conferences, rely on personal visits with talkative second-run bureaucrats rather than more tight-lipped first-stringers. Says Kip: "Newshounds are after spot news, an item. In the daily news business, it is a sin to look for a trend. We're looking for trends."

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