Knight Kiplinger
Encyclopedia
Knight A. Kiplinger [KIP-ling-er] (b. Feb. 24, 1948) is an economic journalist who heads the Kiplinger financial media company in Washington, D.C., publishers of business forecasts and personal finance
advice.
He serves as editor in chief
of all its publications, including the weekly Kiplinger Letter, monthly Kiplinger's Personal Finance
magazine and daily Kiplinger.com. He writes a bimonthly column on financial matters in the magazine and also writes its monthly "Money & Ethics" feature, which explores ethical dilemmas in consumer affairs
, business, and family relations.
In the civic realm, Mr. Kiplinger is active in nonprofit governance and philanthropy, especially in the fields of secondary education
, choral music
, and historic preservation
.
He is a frequent guest on radio and TV programs
(on NPR, CNN, Fox and CNBC, among others) and has appeared on "The Diane Rehm Show", "Charlie Rose Show", "The Today Show", "CBS This Morning," and “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser”. He is an occasional commentator on "Marketplace," the daily business report heard on public radio
stations nationwide.
As a public speaker, Kiplinger frequently addresses audiences of corporate and civic leaders, on such topics as the economic outlook, politics, investing and ethical business
management.
The closely held company he heads, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc., has been honored several times with national ethics awards for its progressive employee relations and business integrity.
Kiplinger is the co-author and editor of several books, including World Boom Ahead (1998), with David Koenig and the staff of The Kiplinger Letter; America in the Global '90s (1989), with Jack Kiesner, Austin Kiplinger (his father) and The Kiplinger Letter staff; The New American Boom (1986), with Sidney Levy and the staff of The Kiplinger Letter; and Washington Now (1975), with Austin Kiplinger.
s tempered by vigilant shareholders and government watchdogs; free global movement of goods, capital and registered guest workers
; the economic empowerment of women worldwide; microcredit for promoting entrepreneurship and alleviating poverty in less-developed nations; employee profit sharing
; and a commitment to corporate integrity. Kiplinger considers himself an economic conservative and social liberal (with a libertarian streak), favoring individual responsibility, private philanthropy, a limited U.S. foreign policy
, and minimal government intrusion in private personal interactions.
He believes that public shareholders should take a more-active role in overseeing the integrity, business practices and executive compensation
of the companies they own. Writing and speaking extensively on business ethics, Kiplinger is critical of lavish executive compensation and a short-run, bottom-line fixation that leads businesses to disrespects their employees and fail to plan for future success. He believes that layoffs should be a last resort, done not to maintain a declining but still-comfortable profit margin
, but only to enable an unprofitable business to survive an exceptionally long and deep slump. Senior executives should voluntarily cut their own pay and benefits, he believes, before asking the same of their employees. In good times, he writes, companies should share their profits and grants of stock options with all employees, from top to bottom, and a larger share should go to the rank-and-file collectively than to senior management
.
On journalism ethics, Kiplinger has criticized the growing dependence of the profession on advertisers and the declining reliance on subscriber revenues, a situation which he feels increases the commercial pressure on journalists to pull punches and favor advertisers in their writing.
In his columns and speeches on personal finances, Kiplinger champions simple living
, with a high savings rate
(at least 10% of gross income
per year), limited use of debt (only for major needs such as a home or college education
), and generous charitable giving. “Let others live the high life now and figure that the future will take care of itself. [Kiplinger] will not live above his means—end of discussion,” wrote a New York Times
interviewer in 2004. In 1993, Kiplinger said of the personal finance magazine he publishes, “We are a magazine for these more-serious times, more-careful times. We are a magazine of planning, of deferred gratification
rather than instant gratification.”
He favors long-term stock, bond and real estate investing
, with an asset allocation
appropriate to one’s age and income, and he urges his readers to eschew short-term speculation, such as day-trading
. “The Kiplinger family has made slow-but-steady a successful investment mantra. When the tortoise races the hare, back the tortoise,” the New York Times wrote.
., a suburb of Washington, under the mentoring editorship of Roger Brooke Farquhar. The Sentinel was the launching pad of many young journalists who later achieved distinction in the profession.
Kiplinger was a Washington correspondent (1970–73) and bureau manager (1976–78) at the Griffin-Larrabee News Bureau, which provided daily Washington coverage to more than 20 newspapers throughout the country, from Maine to Alaska, including all the community dailies of the Ottaway Newspapers subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co. One of Kiplinger’s stories revealed that a Pocono Mountains
(Pa.) vacation home development, whose deceptive sales practices had been cited by the federal government, was owned by a U.S. senator
who sat on the committee that oversaw the regulation of interstate land sales; the senator soon sold the project.
For six years (1978–1983) Kiplinger was chief of Ottaway News Service, overseeing coverage from the chain’s bureaus in Washington, Albany, Boston, and Harrisburg. Also acting as Washington bureau chief, Kiplinger wrote columns and features for the Ottaway papers.
In 1983 Mr. Kiplinger moved to the Kiplinger publishing organization (founded in 1920 by his grandfather, reporter W. M. Kiplinger
) in the position of vice president for publications. In 1985 he became editor in chief of Kiplinger's Changing Times magazine (renamed Kiplinger's Personal Finance in 1991). He succeeded his father, Austin H. Kiplinger, as president of the parent company
in 1992 and editor in chief of The Kiplinger Letter in 1999. (Austin Kiplinger remains as editor emeritus and non-executive chairman of the board
.) Knight Kiplinger is a member of the National Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists
, and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
Kiplinger believes that young adult
s shouldn’t go into their families’ businesses too early, until they have accomplished something on their own; otherwise they will not get an honest assessment of their abilities. “I spent the first 13 years of my journalism career in the employ of others, as a Washington correspondent and bureau chief, making my mistakes on their dime, learning reporting, editing and management before coming to Kiplinger,” he said in a 2001 interview. “When second- and third-generation leaders eventually come into a family business
, there’s often a presumption of incompetence,” he quipped, “so they benefit from low expectations. If you’re actually good at what you do, others are pleasantly surprised. I’ve joked about this over the years with other publishing scions, like Don Graham [publisher of The Washington Post] and Steve Forbes
. We all have our favorite nepotism
jokes. Steve says he owes much of his success to his careful choice of grandparents.”
Kiplinger was instrumental in broadening the company's scope beyond subscription-based print publishing in the 1990s, to include such new ventures as audio, video, software, custom publishing and a Web site, http://www.Kiplinger.com. “Frankly, I’m not entirely confident the upcoming generation of 20- and 30-something executives are going to be willing to pay for information in any form,” he told an interviewer in 2007. “So our strategy is to ‘monetize’ the non-paying reader, by providing a certain amount of free content
to attract them to our ad-supported Web site” and then introduce them to our subscription services.
He moved with his family to Northfield, Ill., as an infant in 1948, when his father left the Kiplinger organization in Washington to take a job as the front-page columnist of the Chicago Journal of Commerce and later went into radio and television news with local Chicago stations and the ABC and NBC networks.
Knight returned to the Washington area
with his family in 1956 and attended elementary school
in North Chevy Chase, Md
. He enrolled in the seventh grade
at Landon School
, a private boys’ school in Bethesda, Md
., when his parents restored and moved to "Montevideo," an historic farm in Seneca, Md., 20 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. As a boy he played piano and folk guitar
, swam on a community team, competed in equestrian events with the Seneca Valley Pony Club and foxhunted with the Potomac Hunt.
In the summer of 1963, he joined his father and older brother, Todd, to march in the massive civil rights
rally on the Washington Mall
, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Kiplinger graduated from Landon in 1965, a member of the Cum Laude Society, president of the student council, and winner of the Headmaster’s Award for the most outstanding graduating senior.
Kiplinger majored in government and history in the College of Arts and Sciences
at Cornell University
, graduating in 1969. He was a member of Alpha Delta Phi
social fraternity and was elected president of Quill and Dagger
, a senior men's honorary society
for student leaders. During the summer of 1968 he was an aide and writer in the U.S. House
campaign of Democratic candidate John S. Dyson, a Cornell friend (class of ‘65) who narrowly lost to Republican Hamilton Fish
in the general election
for the congressional seat in the mid-Hudson region of New York State
. He researched and wrote the draft for Dyson's book Our Historic Hudson, a historical and cultural guide to the region.
After graduating from Cornell, Kiplinger enrolled in the two-year master’s degree
program at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
, majoring in economic development
studies. He left Princeton after one year to seek work in journalism, landing his first job at the Sentinel in Rockville, Md.
He met his future wife, Ann Sheldon Miller, a special-education teacher, at a chorus rehearsal in 1979 and married her later that year. They are the parents of three children: Brigham Cobb Kiplinger (b. 1981), Sutton Elizabeth Kiplinger (b. 1983) and Daphne Lambert Kiplinger (b. 1985), all of whom work in professions unrelated to journalism and publishing.
Kiplinger is a Protestant without formal church affiliation. He is left-handed
, and his hobbies include choral singing, antiques, American architectural history
and gardening. He and his wife practice yoga regularly and enjoy occasional tennis and mountain hiking.
director Dr. Hugh Hayward, M.D., then continued in the Cornell Glee Club
and Sage Chapel Choir, under Thomas Sokol and Donald Patterson, respectively. In 1972 he joined the Oratorio Society of Washington (founded a decade earlier by Dr. Hayward and later renamed The Washington Chorus), and he still sings in its bass section. As members of this large chorus, Kiplinger and his wife have sung in dozens of Kennedy Center
performances with the National Symphony Orchestra
, under such renowned conductors as Mstislav Rostropovich
, Leonard Slatkin
, Seiji Ozawa
, Sarah Caldwell
, and Karl Richter. They also sang on its live recording of the Benjamin Britten
War Requiem
, conducted by Robert Shafer, which won the 2000 Grammy award
for best classical choral recording. Kiplinger is a trustee and past board chair of The Washington Chorus.
“When I’m part of an artistic whole, standing in front of a demanding conductor, I forget that I’m a journalist and the boss of a company—which feels good,” he wrote in The New York Times. “I can rush from an interview at CNN to a chorus rehearsal, and suddenly I’m in a different world. Singing and yoga—these are the kinds of things that give balance to a life.”
He has been a member of the advisory board of the Children's Chorus of Washington since its founding. A longtime supporter and past trustee of the Levine School of Music, a community music school, he chaired the school's capital campaign to acquire and renovate its first permanent home in Washington, D.C.
As a trustee (and later board chair) of Landon School, he co-chaired the school's first endowment campaign. In 1998 he was honored with the Anthony Edward Kupka '64 Award, given annually to a distinguished Landon alumnus, and a few years later, he was given the school’s W. Landon Banfield ’50 Award for outstanding service to the school. Kiplinger is also a member of the Cornell Council, an alumni advisory body of Cornell University.
He is on the board of directors of The White House Historical Association, which supports the furnishings and fine-arts collections of the President's home. He also serves on the advisory board of the historic Congressional Cemetery
in Washington, the resting place of hundreds of notables from the early days of the Republic. He is a former advisory committee member of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, which owns and manages George Washington's home in Virginia. He co-founded a campaign to restore the ruins of an historic 1802 Episcopal chapel and cemetery, Zion Church, in Urbana, Md., 35 miles north of Washington.
Kiplinger is “not a plain-vanilla moneyed guy,” according to a New York Times interview in 2004. “He’s a share-the-wealth advocate who writes hefty checks to charity and has often written advice columns that list philanthropic contributions as morally, and fiscally, right.”
He is a trustee of The Kiplinger Foundation, a family foundation created and funded by his grandfather, W. M. Kiplinger, in 1948. It supports a wide array of charities in the Washington area and nationally, in the fields of secondary and higher education, professional development
for journalists, the arts, social service
and historic preservation. Beginning in 1972 the foundation, under its president Austin H. Kiplinger, created and endowed a mid-career fellowship program for journalists, the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism, at Ohio State University
, in memory of W. M. Kiplinger, who was one of the college’s first two journalism graduates in 1912. The foundation was also the primary funder for 25 years of a Washington, D.C. program of resident fellowships and public-policy seminars for journalists from around the country. It was later absorbed into, and became today’s core mission of, the National Press Foundation
.
In 2008 Knight Kiplinger, his father and his brother were honored for their civic leadership by the Washington chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, which promotes harmony among disparate groups and opposes discrimination against Jews and all other minorities.
----
Personal finance
Personal finance is the application of the principles of finance to the monetary decisions of an individual or family unit. It addresses the ways in which individuals or families obtain, budget, save, and spend monetary resources over time, taking into account various financial risks and future...
advice.
He serves as editor in chief
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...
of all its publications, including the weekly Kiplinger Letter, monthly Kiplinger's Personal Finance
Kiplinger's Personal Finance
Kiplinger's Personal Finance is a magazine that has been continuously published, on a monthly basis, from 1947 to the present day. It was the nation's first personal finance magazine, and claims to deliver "sound, unbiased advice in clear, concise language"...
magazine and daily Kiplinger.com. He writes a bimonthly column on financial matters in the magazine and also writes its monthly "Money & Ethics" feature, which explores ethical dilemmas in consumer affairs
Consumer protection
Consumer protection laws designed to ensure fair trade competition and the free flow of truthful information in the marketplace. The laws are designed to prevent businesses that engage in fraud or specified unfair practices from gaining an advantage over competitors and may provide additional...
, business, and family relations.
In the civic realm, Mr. Kiplinger is active in nonprofit governance and philanthropy, especially in the fields of secondary education
Secondary education
Secondary education is the stage of education following primary education. Secondary education includes the final stage of compulsory education and in many countries it is entirely compulsory. The next stage of education is usually college or university...
, choral music
Choir
A choir, chorale or chorus is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform.A body of singers who perform together as a group is called a choir or chorus...
, and historic preservation
Historic preservation
Historic preservation is an endeavor that seeks to preserve, conserve and protect buildings, objects, landscapes or other artifacts of historical significance...
.
He is a frequent guest on radio and TV programs
Television program
A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...
(on NPR, CNN, Fox and CNBC, among others) and has appeared on "The Diane Rehm Show", "Charlie Rose Show", "The Today Show", "CBS This Morning," and “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser”. He is an occasional commentator on "Marketplace," the daily business report heard on public radio
Public broadcasting
Public broadcasting includes radio, television and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing and commercial financing.Public broadcasting may be...
stations nationwide.
As a public speaker, Kiplinger frequently addresses audiences of corporate and civic leaders, on such topics as the economic outlook, politics, investing and ethical business
Business ethics
Business ethics is a form of applied ethics or professional ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that arise in a business environment. It applies to all aspects of business conduct and is relevant to the conduct of individuals and entire organizations.Business...
management.
The closely held company he heads, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc., has been honored several times with national ethics awards for its progressive employee relations and business integrity.
Kiplinger is the co-author and editor of several books, including World Boom Ahead (1998), with David Koenig and the staff of The Kiplinger Letter; America in the Global '90s (1989), with Jack Kiesner, Austin Kiplinger (his father) and The Kiplinger Letter staff; The New American Boom (1986), with Sidney Levy and the staff of The Kiplinger Letter; and Washington Now (1975), with Austin Kiplinger.
Beliefs and Philosophy
In his weekly Kiplinger Letter, he and his staff attempt to forecast economic and legislative outcomes in a dispassionate, nonpartisan way, without regard to their own or their readers’ wishes. (For a discussion of the Kiplinger forecasting record, see Wikipedia entry under “Kiplinger”.) As a columnist, in his monthly Personal Finance magazine, and as a public speaker, Kiplinger shows a fundamental preference for free marketFree market
A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...
s tempered by vigilant shareholders and government watchdogs; free global movement of goods, capital and registered guest workers
Foreign worker
A foreign worker is a person who works in a country other than the one of which he or she is a citizen. The term migrant worker as discussed in the migrant worker page is used in a particular UN resolution as a synonym for "foreign worker"...
; the economic empowerment of women worldwide; microcredit for promoting entrepreneurship and alleviating poverty in less-developed nations; employee profit sharing
Profit sharing
Profit sharing, when used as a special term, refers to various incentive plans introduced by businesses that provide direct or indirect payments to employees that depend on company's profitability in addition to employees' regular salary and bonuses...
; and a commitment to corporate integrity. Kiplinger considers himself an economic conservative and social liberal (with a libertarian streak), favoring individual responsibility, private philanthropy, a limited U.S. foreign policy
Foreign relations of the United States
The United States has formal diplomatic relations with most nations. The United States federal statutes relating to foreign relations can be found in Title 22 of the United States Code.-Pacific:-Americas:-Caribbean:...
, and minimal government intrusion in private personal interactions.
He believes that public shareholders should take a more-active role in overseeing the integrity, business practices and executive compensation
Executive compensation
Executive pay is financial compensation received by an officer of a firm, often as a mixture of salary, bonuses, shares of and/or call options on the company stock, etc. Over the past three decades, executive pay has risen dramatically beyond the rising levels of an average worker's wage...
of the companies they own. Writing and speaking extensively on business ethics, Kiplinger is critical of lavish executive compensation and a short-run, bottom-line fixation that leads businesses to disrespects their employees and fail to plan for future success. He believes that layoffs should be a last resort, done not to maintain a declining but still-comfortable profit margin
Profit margin
Profit margin, net margin, net profit margin or net profit ratio all refer to a measure of profitability. It is calculated by finding the net profit as a percentage of the revenue.Net profit Margin = x100...
, but only to enable an unprofitable business to survive an exceptionally long and deep slump. Senior executives should voluntarily cut their own pay and benefits, he believes, before asking the same of their employees. In good times, he writes, companies should share their profits and grants of stock options with all employees, from top to bottom, and a larger share should go to the rank-and-file collectively than to senior management
Senior management
Senior management, executive management, or management team is generally a team of individuals at the highest level of organizational management who have the day-to-day responsibilities of managing a company or corporation, they hold specific executive powers conferred onto them with and by...
.
On journalism ethics, Kiplinger has criticized the growing dependence of the profession on advertisers and the declining reliance on subscriber revenues, a situation which he feels increases the commercial pressure on journalists to pull punches and favor advertisers in their writing.
In his columns and speeches on personal finances, Kiplinger champions simple living
Simple living
Simple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one's lifestyle. These may include reducing one's possessions or increasing self-sufficiency, for example. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they need rather than want...
, with a high savings rate
Saving (money)
Saving is income not spent, or deferred consumption. Methods of saving include putting money aside in a bank or pension plan. Saving also includes reducing expenditures, such as recurring costs...
(at least 10% of gross income
Gross income
Gross income in United States tax law is receipts and gains from all sources less cost of goods sold. Gross income is the starting point for determining Federal and state income tax of individuals, corporations, estates and trusts, whether resident or nonresident."Except as otherwise provided" by...
per year), limited use of debt (only for major needs such as a home or college education
Higher education
Higher, post-secondary, tertiary, or third level education refers to the stage of learning that occurs at universities, academies, colleges, seminaries, and institutes of technology...
), and generous charitable giving. “Let others live the high life now and figure that the future will take care of itself. [Kiplinger] will not live above his means—end of discussion,” wrote a New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
interviewer in 2004. In 1993, Kiplinger said of the personal finance magazine he publishes, “We are a magazine for these more-serious times, more-careful times. We are a magazine of planning, of deferred gratification
Deferred gratification
Deferred gratification and delayed gratification denote a person’s ability to wait in order to obtain something that he or she wants. This intellectual attribute is also called impulse control, will power, self control, and “low” time preference, in economics...
rather than instant gratification.”
He favors long-term stock, bond and real estate investing
Real estate investing
Real estate investing involves the purchase, ownership, management, rental and/or sale of real estate for profit. Improvement of realty property as part of a real estate investment strategy is generally considered to be a sub-specialty of real estate investing called real estate development...
, with an asset allocation
Asset allocation
Asset allocation is an investment strategy that attempts to balance risk versus reward by adjusting the percentage of each asset in an investment portfolio according to the investors risk tolerance, goals and investment time frame.-Description:...
appropriate to one’s age and income, and he urges his readers to eschew short-term speculation, such as day-trading
Day trading
Day trading refers to the practice of buying and selling financial instruments within the same trading day such that all positions are usually closed before the market close for the trading day...
. “The Kiplinger family has made slow-but-steady a successful investment mantra. When the tortoise races the hare, back the tortoise,” the New York Times wrote.
Journalism career
Kiplinger started his professional reporting career in 1970, with a brief stint at the Montgomery County Sentinel, an award-winning weekly in Rockville, MdRockville, Maryland
Rockville is the county seat of Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It is a major incorporated city in the central part of Montgomery County and forms part of the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area. The 2010 U.S...
., a suburb of Washington, under the mentoring editorship of Roger Brooke Farquhar. The Sentinel was the launching pad of many young journalists who later achieved distinction in the profession.
Kiplinger was a Washington correspondent (1970–73) and bureau manager (1976–78) at the Griffin-Larrabee News Bureau, which provided daily Washington coverage to more than 20 newspapers throughout the country, from Maine to Alaska, including all the community dailies of the Ottaway Newspapers subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co. One of Kiplinger’s stories revealed that a Pocono Mountains
The Poconos
The Pocono Mountains is a region located in northeastern Pennsylvania, United States. The Poconos, located chiefly in Monroe and Pike counties , are an upland of the larger Allegheny Plateau...
(Pa.) vacation home development, whose deceptive sales practices had been cited by the federal government, was owned by a U.S. senator
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
who sat on the committee that oversaw the regulation of interstate land sales; the senator soon sold the project.
For six years (1978–1983) Kiplinger was chief of Ottaway News Service, overseeing coverage from the chain’s bureaus in Washington, Albany, Boston, and Harrisburg. Also acting as Washington bureau chief, Kiplinger wrote columns and features for the Ottaway papers.
In 1983 Mr. Kiplinger moved to the Kiplinger publishing organization (founded in 1920 by his grandfather, reporter W. M. Kiplinger
W. M. Kiplinger
W. M. Kiplinger was best known as the founder of Kiplinger, a publishing company located in Washington, D.C.. He attended Ohio State University from 1908 until 1912 and was a member of Sigma Pi Fraternity. He moved to Washington, D.C. in 1916 and started the company Kiplinger by 1920.Kiplinger's...
) in the position of vice president for publications. In 1985 he became editor in chief of Kiplinger's Changing Times magazine (renamed Kiplinger's Personal Finance in 1991). He succeeded his father, Austin H. Kiplinger, as president of the parent company
Holding company
A holding company is a company or firm that owns other companies' outstanding stock. It usually refers to a company which does not produce goods or services itself; rather, its purpose is to own shares of other companies. Holding companies allow the reduction of risk for the owners and can allow...
in 1992 and editor in chief of The Kiplinger Letter in 1999. (Austin Kiplinger remains as editor emeritus and non-executive chairman of the board
Board of directors
A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization. Other names include board of governors, board of managers, board of regents, board of trustees, and board of visitors...
.) Knight Kiplinger is a member of the National Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists
Society of Professional Journalists
The Society of Professional Journalists , formerly known as Sigma Delta Chi, is one of the oldest organizations representing journalists in the United States. It was established in April 1909 at DePauw University, and its charter was designed by William Meharry Glenn. The ten founding members of...
, and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
Kiplinger believes that young adult
Young adult (psychology)
A young adult, according to Erik Erikson's stages of human development, is generally a person between the age of 20 - 40, whereas an adolescent is a person between the age of 13 - 19, although definitions and opinions vary. The young adult stage in human development precedes middle adulthood. A...
s shouldn’t go into their families’ businesses too early, until they have accomplished something on their own; otherwise they will not get an honest assessment of their abilities. “I spent the first 13 years of my journalism career in the employ of others, as a Washington correspondent and bureau chief, making my mistakes on their dime, learning reporting, editing and management before coming to Kiplinger,” he said in a 2001 interview. “When second- and third-generation leaders eventually come into a family business
Family business
A family business is a business in which one or more members of one or more families have a significant ownership interest and significant commitments toward the business’ overall well-being....
, there’s often a presumption of incompetence,” he quipped, “so they benefit from low expectations. If you’re actually good at what you do, others are pleasantly surprised. I’ve joked about this over the years with other publishing scions, like Don Graham [publisher of The Washington Post] and Steve Forbes
Steve Forbes
Malcolm Stevenson "Steve" Forbes, Jr. is an American editor, publisher, and businessman. He is the editor-in-chief of business magazine Forbes as well as president and chief executive officer of its publisher, Forbes Inc. He was a Republican candidate in the U.S. Presidential primaries in 1996...
. We all have our favorite nepotism
Nepotism
Nepotism is favoritism granted to relatives regardless of merit. The word nepotism is from the Latin word nepos, nepotis , from which modern Romanian nepot and Italian nipote, "nephew" or "grandchild" are also descended....
jokes. Steve says he owes much of his success to his careful choice of grandparents.”
Kiplinger was instrumental in broadening the company's scope beyond subscription-based print publishing in the 1990s, to include such new ventures as audio, video, software, custom publishing and a Web site, http://www.Kiplinger.com. “Frankly, I’m not entirely confident the upcoming generation of 20- and 30-something executives are going to be willing to pay for information in any form,” he told an interviewer in 2007. “So our strategy is to ‘monetize’ the non-paying reader, by providing a certain amount of free content
Free content
Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work...
to attract them to our ad-supported Web site” and then introduce them to our subscription services.
Childhood and Education
Knight Austin Kiplinger was born on Feb. 24, 1948, in Washington, D.C., the second of two sons of journalist Austin H. Kiplinger (b. 1918), a native of Washington, D.C., and Mary Louise (Gogo) Cobb Kiplinger (1919–2007), who was born in Bronxville, N.Y. and reared in Chicago and Winnetka, Ill. (His first and middle names—Knight and Austin—were the surnames of his maternal and paternal grandmothers, respectively; he is not related to John and James Knight, of the newspaper-publishing family.)He moved with his family to Northfield, Ill., as an infant in 1948, when his father left the Kiplinger organization in Washington to take a job as the front-page columnist of the Chicago Journal of Commerce and later went into radio and television news with local Chicago stations and the ABC and NBC networks.
Knight returned to the Washington area
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
with his family in 1956 and attended elementary school
Primary education
A primary school is an institution in which children receive the first stage of compulsory education known as primary or elementary education. Primary school is the preferred term in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth Nations, and in most publications of the United Nations Educational,...
in North Chevy Chase, Md
North Chevy Chase, Maryland
North Chevy Chase is a village in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It was established as a Special Tax District in 1924 and incorporated as a village in 1996...
. He enrolled in the seventh grade
Seventh grade
Seventh grade is a year of education in the United States and many other nations. The seventh grade is the seventh school year after kindergarten. Students are usually 12–13 years old. Traditionally, seventh grade was the next-to-last year of elementary school...
at Landon School
Landon School
The Landon School is a private, nonsectarian, college preparatory school for boys in grades 3-12, with an enrollment of approximately 675 students. The school sits on in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.-Background:...
, a private boys’ school in Bethesda, Md
Bethesda, Maryland
Bethesda is a census designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House , which in turn took its name from Jerusalem's Pool of Bethesda...
., when his parents restored and moved to "Montevideo," an historic farm in Seneca, Md., 20 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. As a boy he played piano and folk guitar
Steel-string acoustic guitar
A steel-string acoustic guitar is a modern form of guitar descended from the classical guitar, but strung with steel strings for a brighter, louder sound...
, swam on a community team, competed in equestrian events with the Seneca Valley Pony Club and foxhunted with the Potomac Hunt.
In the summer of 1963, he joined his father and older brother, Todd, to march in the massive civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
rally on the Washington Mall
Washington Mall
Washington Mall is an ailing enclosed shopping mall located in South Strabane Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania, just outside the city of Washington, formerly managed by J J Gumberg Co. and now by Oxford Development Company. It is owned by Falconi, a local developer which also owns a...
, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Kiplinger graduated from Landon in 1965, a member of the Cum Laude Society, president of the student council, and winner of the Headmaster’s Award for the most outstanding graduating senior.
Kiplinger majored in government and history in the College of Arts and Sciences
Liberal arts college
A liberal arts college is one with a primary emphasis on undergraduate study in the liberal arts and sciences.Students in the liberal arts generally major in a particular discipline while receiving exposure to a wide range of academic subjects, including sciences as well as the traditional...
at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, graduating in 1969. He was a member of Alpha Delta Phi
Alpha Delta Phi
Alpha Delta Phi is a Greek-letter social college fraternity and the fourth-oldest continuous Greek-letter fraternity in the United States and Canada. Alpha Delta Phi was founded on October 29, 1832 by Samuel Eells at Hamilton College and includes former U.S. Presidents, Chief Justices of the U.S....
social fraternity and was elected president of Quill and Dagger
Quill and Dagger
Quill and Dagger is a senior honor society at Cornell University. It is often recognized as one of the most prominent collegiate societies of its type, along with Skull and Bones of Yale University...
, a senior men's honorary society
Honor society
In the United States, an honor society is a rank organization that recognizes excellence among peers. Numerous societies recognize various fields and circumstances. The Order of the Arrow, for example, is the national honor society of the Boy Scouts of America...
for student leaders. During the summer of 1968 he was an aide and writer in the U.S. House
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...
campaign of Democratic candidate John S. Dyson, a Cornell friend (class of ‘65) who narrowly lost to Republican Hamilton Fish
Hamilton Fish
Hamilton Fish was an American statesman and politician who served as the 16th Governor of New York, United States Senator and United States Secretary of State. Fish has been considered one of the best Secretary of States in the United States history; known for his judiciousness and reform efforts...
in the general election
General election
In a parliamentary political system, a general election is an election in which all or most members of a given political body are chosen. The term is usually used to refer to elections held for a nation's primary legislative body, as distinguished from by-elections and local elections.The term...
for the congressional seat in the mid-Hudson region of New York State
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. He researched and wrote the draft for Dyson's book Our Historic Hudson, a historical and cultural guide to the region.
After graduating from Cornell, Kiplinger enrolled in the two-year master’s degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
program at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is a professional public policy school at Princeton University. The school has granted undergraduate A.B. degrees since 1930 and graduate degrees since 1948...
, majoring in economic development
Economic development
Economic development generally refers to the sustained, concerted actions of policymakers and communities that promote the standard of living and economic health of a specific area...
studies. He left Princeton after one year to seek work in journalism, landing his first job at the Sentinel in Rockville, Md.
He met his future wife, Ann Sheldon Miller, a special-education teacher, at a chorus rehearsal in 1979 and married her later that year. They are the parents of three children: Brigham Cobb Kiplinger (b. 1981), Sutton Elizabeth Kiplinger (b. 1983) and Daphne Lambert Kiplinger (b. 1985), all of whom work in professions unrelated to journalism and publishing.
Kiplinger is a Protestant without formal church affiliation. He is left-handed
Left-handed
Left-handedness is the preference for the left hand over the right for everyday activities such as writing. In ancient times it was seen as a sign of the devil, and was abhorred in many cultures...
, and his hobbies include choral singing, antiques, American architectural history
Architectural History
Architectural History is the main journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain .The journal is published each autumn. The architecture of the British Isles is a major theme of the journal, although it includes more general papers on the history of architecture. Member of...
and gardening. He and his wife practice yoga regularly and enjoy occasional tennis and mountain hiking.
Civic Interests
A lifelong choral singer, Kiplinger began singing at Landon School under glee clubGlee club
A glee club is a musical group or choir group, historically of male voices but also of female or mixed voices, which traditionally specializes in the singing of short songs—glees—by trios or quartets. In the late 19th Century it was very popular in most schools and was made a tradition...
director Dr. Hugh Hayward, M.D., then continued in the Cornell Glee Club
Cornell University Glee Club
The Cornell University Glee Club is the oldest student organization at Cornell University, having been organized shortly after the first students arrived on campus in 1868. The CUGC is a sixty-member chorus for male voices, with repertoire including classical, folk, 20th century music, and...
and Sage Chapel Choir, under Thomas Sokol and Donald Patterson, respectively. In 1972 he joined the Oratorio Society of Washington (founded a decade earlier by Dr. Hayward and later renamed The Washington Chorus), and he still sings in its bass section. As members of this large chorus, Kiplinger and his wife have sung in dozens of Kennedy Center
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a performing arts center located on the Potomac River, adjacent to the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C...
performances with the National Symphony Orchestra
National Symphony Orchestra
The National Symphony Orchestra , founded in 1931, is an American symphony orchestra that performs at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.-History:...
, under such renowned conductors as Mstislav Rostropovich
Mstislav Rostropovich
Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich, KBE , known to close friends as Slava, was a Soviet and Russian cellist and conductor. He was married to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. He is widely considered to have been the greatest cellist of the second half of the 20th century, and one of the greatest of...
, Leonard Slatkin
Leonard Slatkin
Leonard Edward Slatkin is an American conductor and composer.-Early life and education:Slatkin was born in Los Angeles to a musical family that came from areas of the Russian Empire now in Ukraine. His father Felix Slatkin was the violinist, conductor and founder of the Hollywood String Quartet,...
, Seiji Ozawa
Seiji Ozawa
is a Japanese conductor, particularly noted for his interpretations of large-scale late Romantic works. He is most known for his work as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera.-Early years:...
, Sarah Caldwell
Sarah Caldwell
Sarah Caldwell was a notable American opera conductor, impresario, and stage director of opera.- Life :Caldwell was born in Maryville, Missouri, and grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She was a child prodigy and gave public performances on the violin by the time she was ten years old...
, and Karl Richter. They also sang on its live recording of the Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
War Requiem
War Requiem
The War Requiem, Op. 66 is a large-scale, non-liturgical setting of the Requiem Mass composed by Benjamin Britten mostly in 1961 and completed January 1962. Interspersed with the traditional Latin texts, in telling juxtaposition, are settings of Wilfred Owen poems...
, conducted by Robert Shafer, which won the 2000 Grammy award
Grammy Award
A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
for best classical choral recording. Kiplinger is a trustee and past board chair of The Washington Chorus.
“When I’m part of an artistic whole, standing in front of a demanding conductor, I forget that I’m a journalist and the boss of a company—which feels good,” he wrote in The New York Times. “I can rush from an interview at CNN to a chorus rehearsal, and suddenly I’m in a different world. Singing and yoga—these are the kinds of things that give balance to a life.”
He has been a member of the advisory board of the Children's Chorus of Washington since its founding. A longtime supporter and past trustee of the Levine School of Music, a community music school, he chaired the school's capital campaign to acquire and renovate its first permanent home in Washington, D.C.
As a trustee (and later board chair) of Landon School, he co-chaired the school's first endowment campaign. In 1998 he was honored with the Anthony Edward Kupka '64 Award, given annually to a distinguished Landon alumnus, and a few years later, he was given the school’s W. Landon Banfield ’50 Award for outstanding service to the school. Kiplinger is also a member of the Cornell Council, an alumni advisory body of Cornell University.
He is on the board of directors of The White House Historical Association, which supports the furnishings and fine-arts collections of the President's home. He also serves on the advisory board of the historic Congressional Cemetery
Congressional Cemetery
The Congressional Cemetery is a historic cemetery located at 1801 E Street, SE, in Washington, D.C., on the west bank of the Anacostia River. It is the final resting place of thousands of individuals who helped form the nation and the city of Washington in the early 19th century. Many members of...
in Washington, the resting place of hundreds of notables from the early days of the Republic. He is a former advisory committee member of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, which owns and manages George Washington's home in Virginia. He co-founded a campaign to restore the ruins of an historic 1802 Episcopal chapel and cemetery, Zion Church, in Urbana, Md., 35 miles north of Washington.
Kiplinger is “not a plain-vanilla moneyed guy,” according to a New York Times interview in 2004. “He’s a share-the-wealth advocate who writes hefty checks to charity and has often written advice columns that list philanthropic contributions as morally, and fiscally, right.”
He is a trustee of The Kiplinger Foundation, a family foundation created and funded by his grandfather, W. M. Kiplinger, in 1948. It supports a wide array of charities in the Washington area and nationally, in the fields of secondary and higher education, professional development
Professional development
Professional development refers to skills and knowledge attained for both personal development and career advancement. Professional development encompasses all types of facilitated learning opportunities, ranging from college degrees to formal coursework, conferences and informal learning...
for journalists, the arts, social service
Social work
Social Work is a professional and academic discipline that seeks to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of an individual, group, or community by intervening through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice, and teaching on behalf of those afflicted with poverty or any real or...
and historic preservation. Beginning in 1972 the foundation, under its president Austin H. Kiplinger, created and endowed a mid-career fellowship program for journalists, the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism, at Ohio State University
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...
, in memory of W. M. Kiplinger, who was one of the college’s first two journalism graduates in 1912. The foundation was also the primary funder for 25 years of a Washington, D.C. program of resident fellowships and public-policy seminars for journalists from around the country. It was later absorbed into, and became today’s core mission of, the National Press Foundation
National Press Foundation
The National Press Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides training for journalists and awards excellence in journalism. The Foundation was established in Washington, D.C. in 1976.- Activities :...
.
In 2008 Knight Kiplinger, his father and his brother were honored for their civic leadership by the Washington chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, which promotes harmony among disparate groups and opposes discrimination against Jews and all other minorities.
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