Ragan's PR Intelligence Report on target as it enters its third year.

"Follow-Up" 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.

An entrepreneur with passion for an idea can still launch a newsletter from the kitchen table with little capital, but it's becoming more difficult to do so.

This observation comes from Dan Oswald, president of Lawrence Ragan Communications Inc., whose Ragan's PR Intelligence Report entered its third year of successful existence this summer.

It, however, wasn't launched from a kitchen table. Instead it was set afloat in a Chicago office building.

But said Oswald, who has spent his entire career in newsletters, "It's still possible to start a newsletter off the kitchen table, but it's getting harder and harder to do so.

"There are those who watch what a competitor does, and then they launch a newsletter in the same field with much more capital behind it," Oswald said in a telephone interview.

As for his PR Intelligence Report, Oswald said, "It's doing well, and it continues to grow."

He said the newsletter was created to serve both the agency and corporate sides of public relations.

"One of the things it does is provide tips to PR agencies on how they can better position themselves to obtain new business," Oswald added.

The $279/year twice-monthly offers a mix of news, news briefs, opinion, advice, interviews and trend tracking. It has regular features on job openings, trends, government relations, people in the profession, promotion of movies, agency marketing, employee communications, as well as a forum for subscribers.

Oswald said there had been a proliferation of PR newsletters in recent years. It's been a long time when the PR professional was served by just one national newsletter, Public Relations News, which was founded in 1944 by Glenn and Denny Griswold and is now published by Phillips Business Information Inc. PR Reporter followed in 1958, and Jack O'Dwyer's Newsletter began in 1968.

More recent titles include Bulldog Reporter (1979) and Lifestyle Media Relations Reporter (1993), both published by InfoCom Group; The Multinational PR Report (1984), from John Reed; and Healthcare PR & Marketing News (1992) from Phillips

Oswald said Ragan entered the PR newsletter field in 1996 and since then has launched several public relations-targeted titles.

Oswald told NL/NL that he has found that the two best methods for newsletter subscriptions are forced free trials and telemarketing.

"Our forced free trial mailings are of various sizes, from as few as 100 to as many as 5,000, and we get about a two percent return on them," he added.

He said the renewal rate for PR Intelligence Report averaged about 60 percent, but that the rate for the third year, which is just coming in, is averaging about 70 percent. "So we're doing well," he said.

Oswald, who has a bachelor's degree from Westmar College, Le Mars, Iowa, said he has no current plans to publish the newsletter electronically.

"We do updates electronically, and subscribers can go to the web site for information from our newsletters, but we plan to continue to print them and distribute them through the mails," he said, noting that subscribers continue to tell him they want their reading material in print form.

"They tell me such things as 'I want the paper in my hands so I can read it on the plane or in the bathroom," he said.

Oswald said one of the major problems he has in producing newsletters is attracting qualified editorial employees.

"It isn't difficult to find qualified marketing people," he said, "but it's hard to attract editorial employees. We currently have editorial vacancies.

"Just recently a young journalist who had been with us just over a year left to join a start-up newsletter at nearly twice the salary we were paying him," Oswald said. "The newsletter folded within six months, and he was out of a job, but he and others like him apparently are prepared to take such risks.

"Because of the tight market for editorial employees my editorial costs are going up," Oswald said.

"It's hard to attract editorial employees because many journalists, particularly those entering the field from college, aren't aware of the opportunities in the newsletter industry."

The editor of PR Intelligence Report is Anne O'Reilly, who was formerly in public relations. The chief executive officer of the Ragan company is Mark Ragan.

Oswald believes it has become "harder and harder to find niches for newsletters, and it's difficult to expand outside our field," he said.

Related titles from Ragan include The Corporate Annual Report Newsletter (12x, $329/year), Ragan's Interactive Public Relations (12x, $379), Speechwriter's Newsletter (12x, $287), Ragan's Media Relations Report (26x, $297), and Journal of Employee Communications Management (6x, $199).

Ragan also stages two highly successful conferences each year. One is the Strategic PR Conference, held in Chicago in the fall, which is attended by more than 500 persons. The other is the Media Conference, held in the spring in either Chicago or Washington, D.C., which usually has from 400 to 500 people attending it.