Random Lengths newsletter mirrors evolution of non-print delivery of information.

Random Lengths Publications Inc. publisher and president Jon P. Anderson is quick to credit his father, Lester E. Anderson, for not only building up its flagship publication, Random Lengths, to become the wood products industry's leading price report but also for making its information available in non-print formats. "I think my father is an unrecognized pioneer in timely delivery of newsletter information," Jon Anderson told NL/NL. "He turned a free service into a better one for our subscribers, while making money doing it."

That "free service" is an interesting story that put the company in the vanguard of timely delivery. During the 1960s Random Lengths had become a prominent and valuable enough service that subscribers would call on Fridays and have lumber and particle board prices read to them over the phone--prices that they couldn't wait for until Monday. The demand became so great that by the late '60s the company hired part-timers to help with the free phone service because it had to be available to all subscribers at the same time.

(It was also at this time that Random Lengths began experiencing the limitations of what's now called bandwidth: their telephone lines would occasionally get tied up, blanking out incoming calls.)

Lester Anderson realized that this demand for timely delivery of the prices could be turned into dollars. In the early 1970s, he bought a Telex machine and founded the Daily Woodwire. Son Jon, who joined the company in 1974, said, "It was a clunky old machine, about three and a half feet tall. We'd send Telex a list of subs' addresses. And for those who didn't have Telex machines, we used overnight Western Union Mailgram in a cooperative effort with the U.S. Postal Service."

Random Lengths also contracted with Tymnet for third-party delivery. Jon Anderson: "We'd be billed by the number of characters. Let's say a 1000-word article had 7,000 characters and was sent to 1000 subscribers: we're looking at a bill for seven million characters."

The company continued using Telex and Tymnet into the late 1980s. Meanwhile, however, in 1984 Jon took a trip to Japan, where a lumberman showed him a (fairly primitive) fax machine he used to communicate with his Vancouver, B.C., office. "I immediately saw this as the wave of the future," Jon recalled.

These various methods of delivery remain today as supplements to the weekly print version of Random Lengths, currently priced at $224.50/year--and subscribers still want it 3-hole punched, for future reference.

Copyright concerns dogged the father and son's ventures into alternative delivery. "Our copyright attorney told us to educate our subscribers from the outset," Jon said.

"And we continue to educate them in a polite but firm manner. We moved into the alternative methods of timely delivery despite our concern for copyright violations. Frankly, a lot of infringement of our copyrights has gone on and it will surely continue in the future. Despite that concern and the infringement that continues to go on, we have benefitted greatly by moving ahead and using the tools available, which now include fax and e-mail."

Random Lengths' internet ventures are "still in development and still in flux," according to Jon Anderson. "We're still facing a 'capacity issue.' In a ten-minute time frame [so that all subscribers receive the same information at the same time], we have to send out thousands of large PDF files, and bandwidth can be a problem," Anderson continued.

"We also use Xpedite, an e-mail service with tremendous bandwidth."

We visited their web site, www.randomlengths.com, and were amazed at nine pages of free information offered through its Daily Woodwire--which includes an industry calendar, wood products industry news briefs, M&A activity, a list of recently announced mill closures and curtailments, and earnings and dividend announcements.

"That's mainly information our subscribers can find elsewhere," Anderson said, noting the web site is designed to spread the Random Lengths name to prospects. "People still have to pay for our proprietary information--our price reports as well as our analysis and interpretation on such issues as labor and Canadian-American lumber relations.

"Housing starts, for example, is an extremely important topic for our subscribers. While we offer some summaries in Daily Woodwire, the full report is 12 pages and available only to subscribers. Eighty percent of that is our own stuff. It includes 1500 prices each week, which we deliver in PDF format but also should be sent in spreadsheet and database formats--which once again brings up the 'capacity issue.' We're working on it."

Regarding the web site, Jon Anderson said, "I'm anti-pay-per-view. It puts the burden of access on the subscriber. Especially for new, marginal subscribers, the reports need to be sent to them by e-mail, to establish the reading habit. If they have to initiate the visit, we may lose them."

"We haven't promoted e-mail but do regularly remind our subs of it. Probably only ten percent of our subs receive the e-mail."

Asked about his circulation figures, Anderson said their very popular print version is still being printed in "an economy of scale," which we interpret as an impressive press run.

Before Nike put Eugene on the map

Random Lengths was founded in 1943 as a monthly gossip sheet for the wood products industry. It ceased publication during and after World War II, but it was resurrected in 1952 as a weekly lumber price report.

At that time Lester E. Anderson joined the Random Lengths staff in Eugene, Oregon, and by the late 1950s he bought into the publication and subsequently purchased it outright.

Anderson became a leading businessman in Eugene, owning a prominent office building downtown, and serving as mayor of Eugene.

After about 30 years of building Random Lengths into the industry's leading price report, Anderson retired in 1986. He now appears on the masthead as senior editor.

His son Jon Anderson is now publisher, president and owner of the company, which also publishes the weekly Midweek and Export, the monthly Yardstick and the annual Buyers' and Sellers' Guide.