Newsletter publisher bolsters profits with magazines.

"My family was in small newspapers, but I never planned to be in the publishing business. I didn't study journalism in college," explains Bill Haight of Madison, Wisconsin-based Magna Publications. So, he found himself in the travel business, visiting college campuses across the country. "There are a lot of interesting things happening on campus," he said.

Inspired, he returned home to Madison and launched National On-Campus Report (NOCR) in 1973. "I pretty much did it exactly backwards. It wasn't a magazine because I knew I couldn't afford that ... although I knew very little about newsletters. I had the 'idea' for a publication, but no real idea of who would subscribe to this newsletter or why they would want it."

(NOCR gives subscribers, who are college administrators, a heads-up on whatever new weird thing students have thought up to do at some campus thousands of miles away before the trend arrives at their campus.)

From that inauspicious begin-ning, Magna has grown to ten newsletters and two magazines. Haight didn't really plan the spin-off into magazine publishing. He explained, "The publisher of In Business Madison was ready to sell and retire and it seemed like an opportunity. I thought we'd take two-three years to learn the business and then replicate it in other small cities. This year, just 12 years later, we've launched our second title, In Business Rockford (Illinois). There are some similarities between newsletter and magazine publishing, some cross-functions. but the businesses are really quite different."

How has the newsletter business changed in more than 25 years?

"Not really that much," Haight answered. "It's not as easy as it used to be. Basically the biggest change I've seen is that it is just harder to sell new subs. Take NOCR. The publication is very similar to what it was. The subscribers like it. The conversion and renewal rates are outstanding, but it's just harder and harder to sell new subs."

Being headquartered in Madison, he is somewhat isolated, Haight said. "It makes it harder to find and hire experienced people and to feel like you're 'in the loop.' NL/NL and NEPA and their meetings help, but it doesn't really replace being able to call a colleague for lunch on the spur of the moment."

Magna's largest circulation title is The Teaching Professor. "It's typical of ours. The editor is a professor and he's really good, but the information isn't must-have, read-before-breakfast stuff Perhaps that's why, for us, it certainly is true that 'the intenet hasn't changed everything.'"

Little online activity

"Maybe there's a hidden negative somewhere but, for us, there hasn't been much positive effort of the web." With one exception: "We now do three national conferences a year for NOCR, one in the spring and one on both coasts in the fall. We're getting a lot of interest in this on-line ... including many inquiries from overseas, places like India and Russia. I guess we'll see how many of these actually turn into registrations."

Magna is looking for site licenses. "We get requests from schools who want to put titles like The Teaching Professor on their intranets," Haight said. But, so far we haven't done much business that way. We do sell bulk orders and have colleges taking as many as 500 copies.

"Our titles are listed on sites like Infocon and Newslettersonline.com, and from these sources we get more orders for print subs than for electronic delivery.

"I think some of the continuing preference for print products comes from the fact that a print publication is what our subscribers bought in the first place.

"Perhaps the younger generation coming along that is totally computer literate will be different. But they do seem to show a discouraging tendency to believe that everything online should be free. We get inquiries about whether such and such title is available electronically, and when we tell them what it costs they are 'shocked."'

Haight continued, "Our newest launch is OnLine Classroom, and of course everyone in that market is online, but we've begun as a standard print publication mailed in an envelope."

Also reflecting the education market's apparent immunity to the current economic downturn (see p. 1), last March Magna launched Student Exec, an advertising-supported newsletter mailed to more than 15,000 student leaders and advisers at colleges around the country (NL/NL 3/31/01). Only six months later, Haight said, the publication is breaking even.

He commented that he has always felt his market was particularly price sensitive (as do most publishers, but more so in the case of those in the academic market). He does get the occasional note commenting that since the Journal of Academic Something-or-other costs about a nickle a page, how can he justify charging ten times that much for a newsletter?

"But," he said, "perhaps that is changing." Magna launched NOCR in 1973 for $18/year. Twenty-eight years later the price is $149, still on the low side for a b-to-b, twice-monthly, but well ahead of the increase in the cost of living index over the period.