Planning a launch in 2002? The rules have changed. (DM Notebook).

In nearly 25 years, with the newsletter association and as a publishing consultant, I must have heard as many ideas for new newsletters as anyone--many of them remarkably odd. One of my favorites was a guy who was going to publish a newsletter consisting entirely of listings of every sitcom ever on television and the stations somewhere that were showing it in repeats--the idea being that the subscriber desperate to see My Mother the Car could contact another subscriber in Anytown and make a tape exchange arrangement.

But, on the whole (and wackiness aside), the ideas I didn't care for tended to fall into two categories provided by two of the newsletter business's founding fathers.

* Al Goodloe said: "I never want to launch a newsletter in a market where there doesn't seem to be any competition because I don't think I'm smart enough to think of something that has never occurred to anyone else."

As the industry matures, this is probably more true than ever. Part of the reason for the collapse of the dot-coin bubble was the millions poured down cyber rat holes in the belief that being "first entrant" was somehow valuable, even when you couldn't see where revenues were ever going to come from.

* Ed Brown of Atcom liked to say, "A great newsletter idea for which there are no good mailing lists available is a lousy newsletter idea." It's still true.

A few years ago I almost convinced the publishers at UCG to let me launch a newsletter for figure skating fans. (I loved the title, Peggy Fleming's Inside Edge, and Peggy liked it, too.) It was shortly after the great Tonya Harding scandal, and fan interest was booming, but we couldn't get the lists. They do exist-- figure skating association members, Blades on Ice magazine subscribers, "Stars on Ice" national tour advance-ticket buyers--but even Peggy's name couldn't pry them loose for a direct mail campaign, so I tossed in the towel.

How has the internet changed this?

For 2002 launches, I'd add a third caveat. How readily is the information you plan to sell available free on the internet? Whatever the national figure is, I'd say online usage among the people who subscribe to newsletters probably approaches 100 percent.

Most successful business-tobusiness titles publish on subjects the general media ignore, and even a twice-monthly could frequently be a month ahead of the trade magazines. Not anymore. Just the other day a publisher told me, "I can't cover industry news because anything that happens in my industry is on the internet in 20 minutes."

The internet would have clobbered Peggy's and my newsletter. "Information hard to get from any other source" describes many successful titles. Figure skating fit that definition beautifully in 1995. Not anymore. Fans in Moscow take laptops to practices for the Cup of Russia competition and post online reports on "who's looking sharp."

So, in launching a business title in 2002, there really isn't information "not available from other sources," and you cannot be first any longer.

Look elsewhere for your unique selling proposition.

The key: three words. Analyze. Analyze. Analyze. Look for a field where you can tell subscribers "what it means" and "why it's important to me." The ideal position, says Joel Frados, publisher of Chemical Week, is "when what you say is 'news' because you said it. No one else can have that first."

For consumer titles, look for contrarian information. By far the three most successful areas in "contrarian" consumer publishing are these:

* Health--"What the medical establishment isn't telling you."

* Investment--"Inside stuff you won't get from your broker" from an independent source who isn't trying to pump up a firm's investment banking business.

* Travel--"Secret getaways," although among the first fatalities of the online age were the newsletters featuring "bargain fares no one else knows."

RELATED ARTICLE: In the 1970s dawn of home offices, a man ahead of his time launched a newsletter for home office workers. Ignoring Goodbe's reservation, he was first in the field. Against Brown's advice, he entered a field with no mailing lists.

As the by-now apocryphal story has it, the newsletter didn't make it, but the mailing list he slowly compiled subsequently became a gold mine for those with more money, like Time, to rent for elaborate SOHO publication campaigns.