Charles Henderson quietly built one of the largest and most successful operations in newsletter history, title by title, week by week.

If you're like me, you may not know too much about Charles Henderson, who quietly launched a single newsletter 20 years ago--quietly enough that for some years I don't believe the publishing company even had a corporate name.

But today Henderson's NewsRx is, by any measure, one of the largest and most successful newseltter publishing firms in the history of the industry.

Charles Henderson's career in journalism began very early. In the late 1950s, at the age of 10, he was the youngest person ever hired by The Daily Tifton Gazette in rural Georgia, where he worked in printing and circulation..

He later graduated from the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications, earning his tuition writing for the university's news bureau.

During the 1970s and early '80s Henderson worked in a variety of endeavors including business journalism, city government, public relations, film, and television. During that time he even founded an Atlanta suburban newspaper.

Most important, however, as things turned out, was probably his two years as staff correspondent for the Washington, D.C.-based Bureau of National Affairs.

Then, in 1984-85, using contacts he had with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that dated back to his undergraduate days, he launched his first newsletter, AIDS Weekly. Henderson continued to work with the CDC through the initial years of AIDS Weekly (and his second title, Cancer Weekly, launched the following year) well into the '90s.

So, how did he get from publishing one weekly in the mid-1980s to this year when NewsRx currently publishes 102 weeklies (and one lonely quarterly)? Almost all of the growth has been internally generated. "We've made some acquisitions," Henderson said, "but in every case we've folded the subscribers into one of our titles.

"It helped, he said with typical understatement, "that my first newsletter was extremely successful."

Staggering numbers

Here's a current rundown of his offerings, which are all medical-related and divided into clinical, business, and legal aspects of the profession.

In 2004, NewsRx published 57,200 articles in 5,308 issues that year. The target for 2005 is 88,400 articles, and for 2006 it's more than 100,000 (see sidebar).

All 102 weeklies are identical in price: currently $2,595 for the print or online only editions worldwide, $2,895 for both print and online in U.S. and Canada. AIDS Weekly was launched in 1985 at $595, and, as Henderson recalls, "At that time we actually published maybe 42 issues a year."

More than just diseases and infections

NewsRx expanded beyond such medical-specific titles as Blood Weekly, Bioterrorism Week, Heart Disease Week, and Malaria Weekly to offer titles covering the convergence of medicine and law or insurance.

Representative titles under the imprints of NewsRx, LawRx, and IncRx include AIDS Weekly and Law, Cancer Law Weekly, Elder Law Weekly, Health Insurance Law Weekly, Healthcare Finance, Tax & Law Weekly, and Healthcare Mergers, Acquisitions & Ventures Week

The staff at NewsRx

NewsRx currently has 32 editors on board. They are based in Atlanta and throughout the U.S. and Canada. (Interestingly, Charles asked not to specify the full size of the NewsRx editorial or support staff.)

"Most are board-certified medical editors," Henderson said. "They're certified by the Board of Editors in Life Sciences. Board-Certified is an idea that is very popular in the medical world and it has spilled over into medical journalism. But we love those BELS-certified editors; we'll hire them anytime we can." (One can get information about the program at www.BELS.org.)

But here's the part that really opened my eyes. After working 15 years with his brother Alan Henderson, the two have developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that writes the original drafts of many, many of their articles. The idea is to convert the writing process into tiny, tiny steps.

The drafts are then checked and polished by human beings.

The brothers call the system they created AIJ (Artificial Intelligence Journalist), the first and only working IA system in journalism. They plan to put the computers to work soon writing special reports as well.

Editor's Note: "I'm not sure I understand that computers can actually write newsletter stories," I admitted to Charles.

"They can," he replied, "and they do."

I had to immediately call a friend with the news and to say, "You're retired and I'm close to it and a damn good thing." Yet, in retrospect, many times in nearly 40 years I have looked at my keyboard and thought, "A machine could grind out this article."

Marketing

Asked about his marketing strategies, Henderson said, "We do it in the 'traditional' ways. Some direct mail, forced free trials, and online sales from our website (www.NewsRx.com), but the core of our marketing is our in-house prospect list we've developed by hand of about 100,000 names. These are people we've identified who have a directly related interest in our subjects and can afford our products.

"Our contact with them is very soft and personal. One of the editors may write a personal letter discussing a recent article or conference presentation. We don't do a lot of mass 'in-direct' marketing," he said.

Site licenses

"Site licensing has always been a challenge for us. There is still not an understandable or standardized way to set the price. We do every one on an individual basis with our quote based on the size of the company, the number of users, and the amount of our content they wish to access."

Henderson noted,

NewsRx also licenses content to other parties, both those who want to give it away free on their web site and those who wish to resell. Different prices for type of usage, of course.

His NewsRx daily health news appears on the websites of the top U.S. teaching hospitals, including Harvard Medical School and 135 others, plus major pharmaceutical companies like Merck, Genetech, and Sanofi-Aventis.

Charles continued, "I don't know if I can call it a pricing theory, but my goal is for the cost of an article to the end-user to be about $5 or $6." If a weekly newsletter averaged 8--10 articles per issue, Henderson's subscription price of $2,595 comes to just about that level.

21st century workstyle

Although NewsRx is based in Atlanta and Charles officially works out of there, he lives half the year on Maui in Hawaii. He says he "works every day. Many e-mails and a lot of phone calls, especially conference calls with five or six people involved.

He asked that we specifically note the invaluable contributions to his company from Susan Hasty, the Atlanta-based publisher of NewsRx, and editor-in-chief Carol Kohn, who works out of North Carolina.

Charles said he wrote his last article for NewsRx in 2001. He was covering a national conference reporting breaking medical news for NewsRx-TV--yes, he's still using his television background to produce and distribute programming--produced for physicians (distributed via MerckMedicus, RSI, and NewsRx).

"Fred, it was up at dawn for the breakfast session and working into the night--and I just decided I was getting too old for this, time to let younger people take it on," the 55-year-old sole owner of NewsRx said.

Since then he has worked exclusively in management.

21st century lifestyle

In addition to working out of Atlanta and living in Hawaii, he is enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts in Professional Writing program offered by Western Connecticut State University--with a completion expected in 2007.

"The program includes both practical journalism like medical writing and also my private ambition, what I call creative non-fiction.

"Writing," Henderson said with his talent for understatement, "is my only skill."

NewsRx, 2900 Paces Ferry Road, Bldg. D. 2nd Floor, Atlanta, GA 30339, 770-507-7777, fax [phone], www.NewsRx.com, [e-mail]