Add a Dozen Years to Tally and Start Again

chrisdorney - Fotolia

National Mortgage News has now completed three dozen years of publication and is proceeding into its fourth dozen. The newspaper has continued its firm commitment to independently reporting hard news to the industry through good times and bad. And recently, that has meant more bad than good.

NMN started life as National Thrift News in the fourth week of September 1976. The three founders of the enterprise, Stan Strachan, John Glenn and Wes Lindow, recognized that thrifts were a large segment of the financial services industry that had no independent newspaper covering them.

Thrifts had the reputation of being sleepy, dull mortgage originators who ground out a small but steady profit year to year. Stan was a hard news editor, so it might have seemed an odd choice of market, but thrifts were just about to yield as much hard news as anyone could ask for.

By the time the thrift crisis crested in the early 1990s, NTN had become National Mortgage News and had gone far afield to covering the secondary mortgage market and the new lending landscape, where mortgage brokers had supplanted thrifts as origination specialists. (Banks and mortgage banks also maintained considerable share.)

Recognizing the bifurcation of the business into originations and servicing modules. We created separate newspapers for these niches: Origination News and Mortgage Servicing News, both of which remain vital to this day. And we have kept our eye on the Internet boom of the 1990s and the mortgage technology boom in the next decade, starting a magazine, a conference, and an awards program to serve the market.

NMN was early to the digital table, starting a website in 1996 (www.nationalmortgagenews.com) that has continued to develop as digital publishing slowly became a viable entity, on its way to being a dominant entity. For now, we maintain vigorous efforts both in print and online.

But with all the changes in the market and technology over the years, some things haven’t changed. We retain our independent voice and our emphasis on hard news mortgage executives can use, without sugarcoating. And we’ve added data collection, interactivity and industry expertise in the form of op-eds and blogs open to anyone with market expertise and without an ax to grind.

So we are looking forward to the next dozen years, and beyond. The mortgage business has yet to revert to being a sleepy backwater of financial services, and we like it that way.