John Kimball

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

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Areas of Expertise
Display advertising
Newspaper advertising
Newspaper circulation
Newspaper sales and marketing
Newspaper Web sites

John Kimball is the senior vice president and chief marketing officer at The Newspaper Association of America, where he is responsible for the marketing and research initiatives designed to grow print and digital revenue, increase readership, promote the industry and improve work processes for the $55 billion newspaper business.

Before joining NAA Kimball was active in the industry and served as the first president of the advertising federation when NAA initiated them in 1995. He came to NAA in October of 1998 after nearly 30 years with newspapers in Detroit, Denver and Northern New Jersey.

Kimball’s newspaper career started in 1970 at The Detroit Free Press as an advertising account executive. He left in 1981 as vice president of advertising to assume a similar position with The Denver Post. In 1984 he traded the Rocky Mountains for the traffic in Bergen County, N.J., and spent the next 15 years in advertising and marketing management at The Record. He left in 1998 as senior vice president of sales for Macromedia, the corporate parent that owns two daily and more than 40 weekly newspapers across the Hudson River from New York City.

A native of Pontiac, Mich., Kimball graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in advertising and a deep love of green and white. He served three years in the U.S. Army’s First Air Cavalry Division which included a tour in Vietnam where he received The Purple Heart. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Business School executive management program where no Purple Hearts were awarded. He and his wife, Lori, live in Leesburg, Va., in close proximity to his daughter, son-in-law and their two grandchildren in Maryland and his son in North Carolina.

“We lead a lot of horses to the water and hope they drink what we provide,” he said in describing the role of the association’s work on behalf of the newspaper industry.

Media contact: Sheila Owens