Newsletter on international mail and package delivery popular with subscribers.

Editor's Note: we are pleased to reintroduce a series that was previously a popular feature in NL/NL. "FollowUp" reports on the status of newsletters founded two years ago, which is the critical time frame for success or failure since the publisher has gone through two renewal cycles.

We are also pleased to re-engage the services of veteran journalist Hal D. Steward, of San Diego, who was our reporter in the previous series.

If you don't believe there is romance, adventure and excitement in delivering a package to a faraway place, you have yet to meet Harry L. Baisden, editor-publisher of the two-year-old Par Avion newsletter.

Baisden, who subtitles his six-page publication "The International Mail & Delivery Newsletter," told NL/NL he would do two things differently if he were starting anew.

He said that he would have invested more capital in the startup and that he would have created a web site at the beginning.

But despite the hindsight, Baisden believes his newsletter is progressing at a good rate even though he produces it on a part-time basis. His regular job is that of managing editor of a trade newspaper in Washington, D.C.

Baisden was a longtime group publisher at Pasha Publications Inc. until it was sold to Pearson PLC's Financial Times Energy in 1998.

He said he'll continue to produce his newsletter with the help of a couple of freelance writers.

"I enjoy writing about the issues of international mail, particularly package delivery" he said. "My subscribers are senior postal executives literally around the world.

"I've just gotten a subscription from the postmaster of the Republic of Kiribati, which World War II veterans will remember as Tarawa. It was the site of one of the U.S. Marine Corps' toughest battles.

"One of my subscribers is the postmaster of the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean," Baisden said. "Maybe he wants to learn a better way to ship all those cancelled checks."

Par Avion also has subscribers in Macao, Beijing South America, New Zealand, and Australia as well as many of the European and Middle Eastern countries.

"There is a real international movement in package delivery," Baisden said, "as electronic delivery takes over the regular mail business."

He said that Germany, for instance, has just spent $6 billion to buy up package delivery companies in various countries and that shortly the German postal system will make its first public offering of stock shares.

Baisden said the European Union is in the midst of developing new rules for mail and package delivery. He said his newsletter keeps postmasters and other interested persons up-to-date on such developments and how other countries would be affected by such changes.

Par Avion, which is priced at $795/year, was launched in May 1998 with a 5,000 six-issue forced free trial. "I got one percent return on that mailing," Baisden said, "and we continue to grow.

"I'm getting a renewal rate of 75 to 80 percent."

Baisden, a onetime West Virginia journalist who has a master's degree in journalism from Marshall University, said it cost about $30,000 to launch Par Avion, but it would have gotten off to a faster start if the investment had been bigger.

As for the future, he said he should develop his own web site.

"What I want to continue to do is report on how postal systems are transforming themselves to keep pace with what is going on in the mail and package delivery system," Baisden added. "I believe we're doing that."

When asked about the rather high price for his 25-issues-a-year newsletter, Baisden said, "It's the value of the information that sets the subscription price."

At press time, we learned that while attending a meeting this week of the American Hospital Assn. in Nevada, Harry Baisden suffered a heart attack. He went through quadruple bypass surgery but is doing okay now. His wife, Delores, is with him, Our warmest "get well soon" goes out to Harry.