Forbes enters newsletter field with tech titles.

Prestigious Forbes magazine has entered the newsletter and conference business in a big way in a partnership arrangement with the Gilder Technology Group, which operates its editorial office in the solitude of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.

The flagship publication is the Gilder Technology Report, which is edited by George Gilder, the founding editor of a technology segment of Forbes magazine called Forbes A.S.A.P.

The first issue of Gilder Technology Report was published in July of 1996. Then, in 1997, when Forbes became a business partner in the venture, it began regular monthly publication. The "street price" of $295 is a little more than half off the listed subscription price of $600.

The success of Gilder Technology Report and the other ventures is attributed in large part to the marketing and business savvy of the Forbes publishing group.

"Gilder has been working with Forbes in creating new franchises and using their strengths--including money, organization and marketing staff--to bring the products to market," says Mark T. Ziebarth, head of business development at the Gilder Group. Forbes handles the business side--subscriptions, tapes, records--but the editorial side operates out of George Gilder's hometown base of Housatonic, Mass.

It probably didn't hurt the marketing effort for the Gilder Technology Report to open the second page of its promotion magalog and find a picture of Steve Forbes, the Republican Presidential hopeful, heaping praise on George Gilder.

"When it comes to what technology changes mean for business and Wall Street, George Gilder is my authority," states Steve Forbes in a short letter to "fellow investors." "I am convinced that the future as George sees it will happen. His view of the future is constructed on hard data and technological expertise.

"Opportunities to amass truly great wealth are infrequent. But such a time is now. And those of us who recognize the colossal technological changes ahead can make incredible profits. That's why I hope you'll read George Gilder's report," Forbes concludes.

Gilder Technology Report is going "great guns," according to Ziebarth. "It's got tens of thousands of subscribers" with another million-piece promotion scheduled for January.

The editorial content of GTR is "telecosm" (NL/NL 10/3/97, p. 1), a word that was coined by Gilder to describe the convergence of telecommunications, technologies, fiber optics and computers. It focuses on "the coming bandwidth revolution" that will bring with it all the "all-optical network" and a "new communications architecture based on broad bandwidth."

The newsletter's core subscriber base is investors interested in the "telecosm" companies and wanting to grow rich in the coming technology revolution.

"At the start, it was a communications vehicle for George Gilder to talk technology and then it began to take the form of a traditional business-to-business letter," Ziebarth says. "But because of the bull market, it transcended the normal b-to-b market and became a consumer newsletter with great appeal primarily because of Forbes' asute marketing as well as the editorial content," he continues.

Just a few months ago the Gilder-Forbes partnership launched a more traditional type of monthly financial newsletter called The New Economy Watch, which has a subscription price of $399 but a "street price" of $199.

The major promotional effort for New Economy Watch is also a magalog. However, they are testing pricing and packaging as well as different offers--bill-me, hard offers, etc. New Economy Watch reports on those companies that are expected to prosper and grow in the new economy.

The two editors of NEW are John Browning, formerly with The Economist, and Spencer Reiss, a former Time magazine reporter and an editor at Wired magazine. Reiss and Browning have created the Wired Index, an alternative to the Dow Jones Industrials, to identify the "blue chips for the 21st century."

Promotion results are still out for NEW but Ziebarth reports that it already has a subscriber base "in the thousands."

The Forbes-Gilder Group has run two "sold-out" conferences. The Telecosm conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif. in Sept. drew 350 people who paid $3200 each to hear Gilder and others--such as Steve Forbes and his brother Tim Forbes, the CEO of Forbes, and Forbes magazine publisher Rich Karligaard--on the future of telecommunications.

Another Gilder-Forbes-sponsored financial conference in New York in Oct. was also sold out, according to Zeibarth. It drew 200 who paid $2200 each.