Young Austin did some work for the Kiplinger Washington Letter in high school and after his graduation from Cornell University. But he itched to get out of Kiplinger publishing and out of Washington.

"You don't want to be a hothouse flower," he says.

So he became a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. He took leave to serve as a naval aviator in the Pacific during World War II and came back to help his dad start Changing Times magazine in 1946. But then he went off again to write a column for the Chicago Journal of Commerce.

Television news was in its infancy when Kiplinger jumped to the new medium. In Chicago he covered politics for NBC and ABC. He also did the first TV show on business news. He was getting feelers from the networks in New York when in 1956 his dad sent him an SOS saying he needed help.

Austin came home to work for Kiplinger Washington Editors and the magazine, now called Kiplinger's Personal Finance. In 1961 he succeeded his father as editor-in-chief. "I knew this was the job I should be doing," he says. The Kiplinger Letter is now the longest continually published newsletter in the country. Austin's son Knight has succeeded him as editor-in-chief. His other son, Todd, is vice chair of the board.

In addition to his journalism career, Austin Kiplinger followed his father's lead as a collector of Washingtoniana. He championed the creation of a city museum for the District of Columbia. It opened this year.

Kiplinger is chairman emeritus of the Cornell Board of Trustees and a trustee of the Tudor Place Foundation, the Federal City Council, the National Symphony Orchestra and the National Press Foundation.

The economy – and the publications that report on it – have traveled a rocky road in the last few years. But Kiplinger is optimistic about both.

"Business is everybody's business," Kiplinger says. Mainstream journalists have caught on to the message, but they haven't quite caught up with Kiplinger's.