Employing a "diagonal" strategy, NewsRx expands from health to legal and business.

NewsRx, publisher of professional health and medical newsletters and databases for 20 years, is moving into law and business publishing with the addition of 56 new titles for 2004. Charles W. Henderson, NewsRx's founder and CEO, said 29 legal titles will be published under the company's new LawRx imprint and 15 business titles under the IncRx imprint. The company is adding 12 new titles under its NewsRx banner.

NewsRx, with imprints, now publishes 100 titles, all weeklies except for one quarterly.

"Our new LawRx titles include Elder Law Week, Biotech Law Week, Hospital Law Week, and Managed Care Law Week. New IncRx titles include Hospital Business Week, Cardiovascular Business Week, and Lab Business Week," Henderson said. "NewsRx is adding Health Insurance Week, MD Week, and Medical Imaging Week."

Asked if the expansion represented both a horizontal and vertical expansion--horizontal into the law and business areas but vertical by staying the health and medical industries, Henderson told NL/NL, "You are correct in that there is a relationship between our expansion into law and business and our history in biotech, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare. I don't know for sure how long the connection will continue, as we are moving further away from our roots.

"One encouraging sign, however, has been a mammoth increase in interest in site licenses for our content at the small and large pharmaceutical and biotech companies, both in and out of the U.S."

The new titles, which will roll out January 5, 2004, are sold to subscribers in both print and electronic formats. They are typically 30 pages or more each week, with an average of 50 to 100 articles in each. NewsRx also sells its content through news services, including Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters company; LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier; Dialog, NewsEdge, and Westlaw, all Thomson businesses; EBSCO Publishing; ProQuest; and PinnacorMarketWatch.com.

In addition to newsletters, the company produces NewsRx-TV, which covers about a dozen major medical conferences each year and sells the news video footage.

Expansionist thinking

NewsRx has been associated so long with the health care and medical field--and very successfully at that--we asked Henderson what led him to enter other fields. "We have been planning to expand into other subject areas for some time, and law always has piqued our interest. Our content is on Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw, and we discussed our titles and expanded coverage with lawyers and the folks at LexisNexis, then developed our topics," Henderson said.

"We've already got a pre-sold revenue stream in place, just waiting to deliver the first week's issues. In those discussions, we also discovered some unmet needs for business titles as well.

"We discovered areas that are not being met by the large tax and legal newsletter publishers, and to tell the truth, I've been surprised at the quick acceptance of our tax, finance, and legal content by that industry. But there have been population, demographic, and economic changes which have increased demand for new and underserved niches," Henderson said.

The technological challenges

"For about a year, we've been gearing up on the editorial side," Henderson continued, "but the biggest challenge was new software and hardware on the technology side. Our IT department came to forefront and met the challenges.

"There's a lot to deal with when you have about a hundred weeklies and 5,000 to 10,000 articles each week--that's over 5,000 issues and a half-million new articles a year.

"It requires some powerful technology and it takes the computers a lot longer to get it all done each week. We've had to make some new hardware purchases, and my biggest surprise was how long it takes the software to do its thing during the week. We have them running 24 hours a day," Henderson said.

Second consecutive year of major expansion

Even with the current expansion, Henderson shows no signs of slowing down. "This is the second year in a row that we've doubled our number of titles. Sufficient resources were assembled over the past year for this expansion. If we look toward expansion to 200 titles and a million articles a year in 2005, it may be too much too quickly. We may skip a year and wait until 2006 for the next big expansion.

"But we'll just have to see how smoothly it goes for the six to 12 months. I'm confident the revenues will result in profitable LawRx and IncRx imprints, but I'm not sure how smoothly the operation will perform internally.

"We are having increased difficulty finding the editors and management personnel we need, and recruiting is now a major part of operations for the first time in the history of NewsRx," Henderson concluded.

Notable titles

NewsRx, founded by Henderson 20 years ago, publishes such notable titles as Vaccine Weekly, Women's Health Weekly, AIDS Weekly, Cancer Weekly, Biotech Week, Drug Week, Malaria Weekly, Health & Medicine Week, and Medical Letter on the CDC & FDA.

NewsRx also owns extensive proprietary publishing and health information technology, including AI Journalist, a software suite and acronym for artificial intelligence journalist.

NewsRx, 2900 Paces Ferry Rd., Vinings Sq., Bldg. D, 2nd Fl., Atlanta, GA 30339, 770-216-1814, www.newsrx.com