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Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
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A
This episode is brought to you by espolontequila slow sticky snoozy they call these the dog days of summer but espolon they don't do boring welcome to the mark days espolontequila one hundred percent blue weber agave born to shake up your summer just add lime agave and a little attitude visit espolontecila dot com espolontecila forty percent alcohol volume eighty proof copyright twenty twenty five campari america new york new york drink responsively hello everybody this.
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Is marshall po i'm the founder and editor of the new books network and if you're listening to this you know that the nbn is the largest academic podcast network in the world we reach a worldwide audience of two million people you may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast as you probably know there are challenges basically of two kinds one is technical there are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed and the second is and this is the biggest problem you need to get an audience building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today put this in mind we at the nbm have started a service called nbn productions what we do is help you create a podcast produce your podcast distribute your podcast and we host your podcast most importantly what we do is we distribute your podcast to the nbn audience we've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you if you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast please contact us just go to the front page of the new books network and you will see a link to nbn productions click that fill out the form and we can talk welcome to the new books network.
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C
Rob wells book the insider how the kiplinger newsletter bridged washington and wall street is an exploration on the importance of specialized journalism by taking the case of one of the most influential newsletters in recent history thank you so much for being here.
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D
Rob well thanks for having me kavi.
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C
Appreciate it of course why don't we start by having you tell everyone a little bit about your book what it's about and how it came to be.
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D
Sure so the book is about willard kiplinger he's the founder of the kiplinger washington letter and the kiplinger personal finance magazine he founded this company that became one of the leaders in business journalism he's one of the most important and influential business journalists in the history of this country he was also a real pioneer in this multi billion dollar market for trade journalism which is specialized journalism that goes to specific businesses and so forth and his work this was the first biography that was ever done by an academic of him nobody had studied him and nobody had ever looked at his his entrepreneurial life and the various businesses he started how this book came to be was quite an adventure and quite fun i was asked as a as a professor to write an encyclopedia article on kiplinger and i was quite excited to do that because i was somebody i didn't know much about so i had a friend who worked at kiplinger as a as a columnist and i sent her a note i said who runs the library who could give me some background about the founder is willard kiplinger died in nineteen sixty seven and she goes well you know the library isn't around anymore but the grandson is still around and kiplinger's grandson knight kiplinger would probably talk to you you know so i get a hold of knight kiplinger it turns out that we had worked for the same company knight had worked for dow jones and company and i had worked at dow jones so we had that in common turns out the knight was an amateur historian and i was a professional historian and i was one of the few people who actually had studied that field of journalism that the kiplingers work in and so i knew quite a bit about his his industry so a a brief conversation it was supposed to be a brief conversation to get the resume ended up with an hour and a half talk and he ended up sending me two fedex boxes with his grandfather's unpublished memoirs wow it was a freaking gold mine what a treat and and it kept coming you know and so i went through that scanned it all sent it immediately back to him showed him i had great respect for this material asked him questions and then he invited me out to the family house in suburban maryland which is really should be in the library of congress because they have twenty file cabinets of original correspondence between willard kiplinger and presidents and ceo's all in the basement and they let me have full access to it i was the first academic to look at.
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C
This stuff wow getting into the book as well in the introduction you wrote the insider offers an important perspective on the ongoing debate about whether capitalism and democracy are compatible can you elaborate more on what you found about that relationship between capitalism and democracy yeah so this.
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D
Kind of goes to the heart of the book and the book is on you know university of massachusetts press and the journalism and democracy series and so what i was trying to do is through looking at kiplinger is to make a bigger argument about the compatibility of capitalism and democracy and this is a current issue today we see heavy influence of corporate power in the political sphere wealth inequality is as worse as it's ever been you know whether people are struggling on over living wages and so forth and we're really trying to get to you know how fair and equitable is modern capitalism in a lot of our debates so kiplinger was at a point in our country's history where capitalism was on the ropes it really you know laissez faire capitalism had failed in nineteen thirty three and i define failure as a bank holiday if the banks don't open then capitalism doesn't work you know because you you can't have you know free exchange for markets and so capitalism had failed and there was this big debate you know what should we do with how should we go forward and how has capitalism really served our democracy should we find another economic system should we you know go to socialism or some other form and he was part of this process where we wanted you know there was this movement to repair capitalism to try to bring it into into a regulatory framework and to require of our businesses to have more social responsibility and so that's what was really interesting about him and is he was a business writer telling businesses that this is how you need to clean up your act franklin delano roosevelt's in the white house he's proposing this new deal and you should give it a shot and so it was pretty radical at that time and the basic message was we want businesses to improve but you have to take responsibility for your social impact so that's how i see the the intermingling of those two speaking.
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C
More on the new deal kiplinger's letter provided a beacon of reliable discretionary information and keatings to comply actually with the new deal what do you think the purpose or the role of journalism in society was then and how do you think it's evolved now well what was.
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D
The journalistic field has radically transformed since the nineteen thirties and the field back then in the nineteen thirties was journalism was providing facts and not a lot of analysis or interpretation in daily news coverage i was left to the editorial pages there was a very rigid line between analysis which should be on the editorial page and just straight news reporting kiplinger had worked in traditional journalism and was very successful he had worked for the associated press he was an ap reporter in washington during woodrow wilson's time as president and became an expert in business reporting and so he had this really strong grounding in traditional reporting and he knew the value of it but he also saw the limits and he wanted to do more analytical reporting to tell people about the trends behind what was happening in business and government and the ap at that point was like forget it we're just telling the facts the analysis is not our job and he really chafed at that so he went out and innovated and created this new blend of analysis and reporting and some of it actually was trying to predict and offer businesses an idea of what would happen in the future and how to interpret today's events so he was really moving into a much more modern form of journalism that we see all the time you see it on the front page of the new york times news analysis that's what willard kiplinger was doing so he was a big pioneer in that in that field he.
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C
Was also somewhat of a bipartisan journalist and he didn't just participate but he really drove the political and the business landscape of the nineteen thirties what is something that you found really surprising in your study of kiplinger's life and his.
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D
Journalistic style so i saw i went through his letters you know his grandson gave me access to you know this huge volume of letters he kept a carbon copy of like everything he wrote even letters to his kids it was just an amazing amount of material and so i saw all of the this correspondence he had with political figures he was writing to fdr he's writing to hoover herbert hoover and all of these politicians within the white house and he was trying to at one point market himself and the other point kind of offer advice on how they could actually do better and how their their message might be better received excuse me by by businesses he had an opportunity to spin a message if he wanted to and there was this one opportunity where a white house official named raymond moley who was roosevelt's top speechwriter at the time one of the architects of the new deal moley was going to speak before a very controversial and influential business group called the national association of manufacturers excuse me and moley had asked kiplinger for advice on how on what should go into the speech and kiplinger could have really provided an opportunity to get in some political digs and do some some partisan spinning but kept you know very consistent to his message he goes you know you should really tell businesses how they should they they can you know be more socially responsible so that was a really revealing opportunity where he had a chance to be a partisan and he did not and in all of my dealings and analysis of his of his material i could see in his letters that he was leaning you know center right he was more on the business side a little bit more conservative on economics but in his news reporting he was very much straight down the middle and i thought that was really admirable that he could set aside his personal opinions and provide this analysis that got to serve everybody and he had a very good reputation for fairness so i think that's a great modern lesson of kiplinger's work is his ability to be fair in a very highly partisan church atmosphere the holidays are coming.
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C
Home do you think it's possible for journalism now to still be unbiased or bipartisan in the way that it used.
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D
To mean no i don't think it's possible the media system is just so different i think it's essential that news organizations try to provide as fair an account of a situation and disclose their their biases and their their leanings and their funding sources and their ideology and that's a way to try to you know gather more trust from the public there are you know a number of national news organizations that aren't doing that and they claim that they're fair and balanced or that they're you know and they're clearly pushing an agenda and it just leads to this this incredible cynicism a lot of that is driven by the market and by attempts to attract advertising dollars and market share through advertising the best opportunity that we would have for fair journalism that discloses its biases because all of us are biased in my opinion one way or another but those that truly can disclose it would be these new nonprofit news websites that clearly disclose their funders disclose their mission and so people reading these websites will know if i'm going to go here i'm going to have a news organization that's trying to advocate for the uplift of this community you know and tell the stories of this community good bad and so forth so i come down on the side that we all have biases and we as because we're human beings and we as journalists need to disclose and be as transparent as possible with our readers about those biases and then go out of your way to be as fair as possible my experience as a political reporter i covered newt gingrich the former speaker of the house one of the most influential conservatives of the twentieth century you know led the republican revolution in the house of representatives i didn't agree with newt gingrich's politics at all newt gingrich talked to me because i was fair to him so that's i think i think they knew where i was coming from and i would challenge him but i was fair and that's why he kept picking up the phone when i called him and.
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C
I can see why you admire that about kiplinger as well i want to say something or i want to ask about his level of literary discernment he had an ability to sift through rumors propaganda and spin and he could cut to the meat of it and that's something that it's a contentious topic now as we see you know media literacy under fire today how do you think he was able to develop that skill and master it and do you have any advice for listeners now who might be struggling to practice media literacy so.
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D
For for someone like kiplinger who whose professional identity was a journalist there was a workflow that was established back then and i was introduced to when i got into national journalism and it's basic complete immersion in the field you are reading all the time and you're reading a huge array of material and it's your job to read the national review and mother jones and good housekeeping sports illustrated and so you're going through that you're watching television you're just completely immersed in this process of consuming media and then you're talking to people about it then you're debating it and you're reading the criticism of it and so he had started doing this in like in college in the early nineteen hundreds and had built that foundation up and that's i think just through this complete immersion in this sort of mastery of the media stream and in constant engagement with people that he would hire who were just who had similar skill sets they were voracious readers they were voracious networkers they were excellent reporters and they would argue about the news and that's what their news meetings were about every week where we think you know this is the most important you know development of the week no you're wrong it's this one because it's going to blow up in someone's face six weeks later and they'd have these highly educated debates and so being in this journalistic field where you're consuming and debating it all the time that is how it became to be such a sophisticated you know observer of media that's a tall order for someone who is just you know an average reader and so forth i think the main thing that needs to be done for media literacy for the average person is to not consume material that comes across social media algorithms and try to go and be very conscious to go to the source of a news site and pay the the subscription fee because you are then supporting professionally curated and edited journalism and read broadly on these sites and try to pick a site that you don't necessarily agree with national review would be one of mine i don't necessarily agree with their politics i think their journalists they have an important take on conservative politics peggy noonan is a very elegant writer on the wall street journal editorial page former speech writer ronald reagan she has an important perspective you know so i try to get a diversity of voices pay for news and spend time actually reading it rather than skimming over you know what might be curated headlines sent to you by robots you know the algorithm is not your friend if you want to become media literate it's very very difficult to surmount unless you're you know completely consumed in this in this field i.
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C
Agree i think the algorithm definitely funnels you into an echo chamber of whatever you agree with so i understand your point of being willing to and able to face disagreements and debates i think that's a great point last question if there's one thing that you want readers to take away from your book what.
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D
Would it be i was just amazed at the sophistication and the risk taking of willard kiplinger he never took the safe way in his career he could have stayed at the ap and just in nineteen eighteen he could have stayed at the ap and just had a perfectly fine career if he just kind of like sucked it up and went ahead with how the ap viewed news but he wouldn't do that he took this really kind of radical detour and went to go work for a bank as a as a political analyst and then launched his newsletter on the side and the newsletter became wildly successful in the forties and fifties he was the highest most highly paid person in the country he didn't stop there he launched a new magazine in nineteen forty eight and then after that software radio programs on tv so he was very you know relentless in trying to stay relevant in in the field and i thought that sort of entrepreneurial energy matched with his reporting chops made him such a fascinating and unique figure that's wonderful well.
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C
Thank you so much for your time i'm sure listeners and readers are going to be eager to get their hands on your book so thanks for taking the time to speak with me thank.
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D
You i enjoyed it very much i appreciate these thoughtful questions.