The story of INMA is that of:

• The newspaper industry's relationship with marketing.

• A network's constantly ambitious and curious search for new ideas and answers to expand the newspaper's influence.

The relationship with marketing is a mixed one. Every newspaper publisher agrees they must integrate marketing into the soul of their company if all "success metrics" are to be achieved. Yet the barriers feel too high in the context of rising revenues and profitability. The reasons "why" publishers should consider change have been going on since 1930:

• Why change when times are good?

• Why invest in a marketing unknown when one knows the return on investment from sales pressure, discounts, and gimmicks?

• Why spend the internal corporate "political capital" to bend the editorial, sales, and production cultures to that of a customer-focused marketing culture?

• Why look outside the newspaper to customers when a laser-like focus on what is done inside the newspaper is our historical legacy?

• Why measure what we do when our industry was built on decisions made by gut instinct?

For eight decades, INMA has injected tension into discussions of how newspapers should go to market.

The association has fought this cultural battle at different levels over the years:

• Selling Promotion As a Profession. When times were simple in the 1930s, that was an issue of "achieving less disrespect" for the fledgling profession of promotion.

• Promotion As Path To CEO. By the 1950s, the promotion department was the only operation within a newspaper that had its hands in all other departments - making it, for the first time, a popular path to becoming chief executive officer.

• From Promotion To Marketing. In the 1960s and 1970s, leading newspapers began employing sophisticated methods of engaging the market beyond the simpler creative mandate of promotion. For the first time, newspapers employed "marketing" techniques borrowed from the packaged-goods world: customer-focused, brand-intensive, and multi-media in nature.

• Pushing Marketing As a Culture. In the subsequent decades, a marketing ethos slowly began to seep into the newspaper industry culture across departments - an evolution that continues to this day.

The canvass on which INMA operates to find hungry, curious, and different ideas for its members continues to expand. It has been a viral journey over 75 years.

The journey started among large metropolitan newspapers in the United States in the 1930s. It evolved to Canadian newspapers and smaller American newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s, European newspapers joined the INMA network. Newspaper executives in the South Pacific "discovered" INMA in the 1970s, while Latin Americans became involved in the 1990s. Today, as globalisation becomes the norm, newspapers from Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have begun integrating their stories into the INMA fabric.

When the founders of INMA looked at their peers in 1930, they saw perhaps 30 U.S. metropolitan newspapers on which to potentially draw inspiration and ideas. In 2005, INMA's canvass of inspiration and ideas is represented in the 8,391 daily newspapers in 130+ countries worldwide.

With an expanding canvass, INMA has become the newspaper industry's explorer. For all of its history, volunteers have led the exploration. Only in 1968 did INMA add a professional staff to run the association's operations.

In the decade-by-decade history on this page, you will read about the people, ideas, and stories behind INMA's impressive first 75 years. Some of the stories are broad and grand. Other stories are small and local. Yet the mosaic of any organisation's history is made up of all shades of colours and all sizes of objects. Take one element away, and it becomes a different mosaic.

The newspaper industry's lukewarm embrace of marketing and the expanding global canvass from which INMA draws inspiration are the backdrops for this association's 75-year history.

Yet the embrace grows warmer. And the canvass grows bigger.

What will INMA's historical passion for learning and exploring bring the association in the next 75 years? Stay tuned.