Damn the economic torpedoes, SIPA executive director says, full speed ahead.

Specialized Information Publishers Association executive director Henry Greene reports that both new memberships and renewals from existing members are up from the last fiscal year. The base may be lower than it once was, but "up" is certainly better than "down."

Are the new members mainly traditional newsletter publishers branching out into online ventures or more web-based-only operations? Greene answered, "A little bit of everything. We are working hard at being proactive to find newer types of publishers, but we have, among newer members, both print newsletter publishers and some who have never printed a piece of paper.

"The newer types of publishers are challenging to find," Henry said. "We're working diligently on list swaps with related organizations and other possible sources. I won't say we've hit a home run, but I think we have gotten a few singles."

Greene, who's been SIPA's executive director a year now, finds "the pace at SIPA quite different" from his experience running his own telemarketing services company with 300 employees. He says the emphasis is the same, "Keep the clients happy." Most of the current staff are greener to SIPA than Greene is--after the departure last year of longtime staffers Janine Hergesel (14 years) and Patti Wysocki (22). But he said the new assistant director, Nate Parsons, comes from the Decision Health division of UCG with experience in the industry.

Conferences--then and now

When I asked him at year's end to forecast the prospects for the association and the industry for 2009-2010, Greene replied, "If I knew those answers, if I had a crystal ball, I would have stayed in Las Vegas where we just had our December conference."

"Attendance was down about 15 percent," he said, "but I think that was largely a case of fewer people but representing about the same number of companies as the previous year."

The Dec. 31, 2008, NL/NL put the number at 170, taken from registration rolls and walk-ins--down from 270, which is closer to a 40 percent decline than 15 percent. SIPA has held this early-December meeting annually for more than 25 years--at first always in New York City but recently in various locations. While the initial focus was on direct marketing, it has in recent years focused on online publishing and online marketing.

The record attendance was about 335 in N.Y.C. sometime in the early '90s, but all agree the industry has changed since then.

But let's put the drop in attendance at SIPA's conferences in perspective: Both the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Magazine Publishers of America have called off their 2009 annual conventions.

The 2008 SIPA meeting program was devoted predominantly to new technologies, including the uses of the social media functions. Some publishers, particularly business-to-business types, may simply have felt that Facebook, Twitter and other social networking areas weren't relevant to their operations.

New initiatives

This April SIPA will co-sponsor a meeting in New York with the Specialized Industry Information Association (SIIA) devoted to sales training and sales force management, not an area which has been of interest to many publishers previously.

NL/NL asked about SIPA's role in actively promoting a conference offered by the Mequoda group. SIPA members receive a registration discount, but the rationale, Greene said, was strictly a list-swap arrangement--"giving us access to some interesting new names. They promoted our meeting and we did theirs, a one-time deal."*

SIPA, 8229 Boone Blvd., #260, Vienna, VA 22182, 800-356-9302, www.sipaonline.com

* In my day, I know at least some board members would have been worried about promoting "competition" from another expensive conference.

Secondly, some worried about other members lining up to ask the association to promote their meetings and products. That's evidently not the case today.

--Fred Goss, executive director of the newsletter association 1979-1994