Thirty-year newsletter veteran Llewellyn King offers candid assessment of the newsletter industry and his own operation. (Publisher Profile).

Llewellyn King's boyhood ambition was to be Prime Minister of Great Britain. Frustrated in this because he was not British (he's from Kenya), King did, however, succeed in being unemployed on Fleet Street by age 21, "and frequently thereafter."

After moving to the States, King's career included a stop as a founder of perhaps the first feminist magazine in the U.S., but in 1973 he found himself unemployed again--simultaneously laid off by The Washington Post, for which he was writing op-eds, and by McGraw-Hill who didn't think he should be writing op-eds.

"So I looked at my boss at McGraw-Hill," King said in a telephone interview, "decided he was gifted but not a genius, and that I could do what he did, and, using my specialized knowledge of the energy field, launched an energy newsletter." Launched as a weekly in 1973, it has been The Energy Daily for many years- currently priced at $1,675/year.

"Mercifully, right about then the energy crisis came along. It was a gift from the gods for me," King said.

Much change in the industry

In 30 years King has seen much change in the newsletter business. "There are many more newsletters and many more published by publishing conglomerates. One problem of the business is that the threshold for entry is so low that there will always be imitators, and the producers of quality products need to wait for them to perish."

"Many are too driven by marketing and not by product and the news. I have the extraordinary elitist view that a newsletter is a newspaper in microcosm. We serve the same function and should hold the highest standards of quality," King said.

"You can sell anything once or twice, but the market will 'find out.' Newsletter publishers don't pay their staff enough and they don't get the best minds," he added.

"Newsletters, after all, are an exquisitely pure form of journalism. People actually pay for the words you write. There is no subsidy from advertisers.

"I believe newsletters can be much broader than they typically are," he continued. "There is no reason why they can't contain editorials and regular columns."

Eight titles

King Publishing Group, based in Washington, D.C., currently produces eight titles, including Defense Week ($1,265/year), New Techology Week ($900), the weekly Navy News & Underseas Technology ($665), and the consumer newsletter White House Weekly ($99).

"I don't believe in a vast number of titles. The problem is that newsletter publishing in not a high-margin business. But when you get over, say, 12 titles, you see a classic management problem. You need high-quality managers and you don't have the money to pay for them. You need $250K managers and you pay $50K.

"As volume increases, the publishers lose control of the quality of the content and end up with weak, poorly edited products.

"I see it as a talent drought," King said. "Newsletters don't attract the smart kids from the best universities. Journalism used to be a way out of the ghetto, much like boxing. You could tract bylines on The New York Times over the past 40 years or more: first the Irish, then the Italians, and the Jews. Now we get candidates from journalism schools. They may be fully formed, but they aren't the best minds."

Economics of newsletter publishing

"I think of newsletter publishing as a cottage industry that perhaps needs be pensioned off rather than believe it can grow. The economics of newsletter publishing are exquisite from the kitchen table, but awful when you are sitting in an office building and hiring staff.

"I see no real solution," King said. "There is no fundamental difference between owning one McDonald's and six. You are selling the same hamburgers. But publishing six newsletters is very different. Your readerships are not monolithic, and as publisher you need to understand the frustrations of the industry and you can't have this understanding over 25 industries.

"We [the newsletter industry] have not yet learned what to do with the internet--other than to take print publications and throw them up there. I'm not different. I haven't had the 'bright idea' of how to make it work. And it pisses me off. Not just the money, but the fact that I haven't figured out how to make it work for us," King said.

"Each new technology or medium that emerges tends to bring out a new set of people and ideas.

"The auto manufacturers should have been the logical people to make airplanes. They knew sheet metal, understood electrical systems, but they couldn't bring themselves to do it," King observed. "Newspapers should have been the television stations. It's only providing information in a different medium.

"When I was with International Television News (ITN) in London, we had people like me from Fleet Street, from BBC Radio, from Movietone News. It wasn't working. It took a 24-year-old woman to pull us together and say, 'This isn't newspapers, radio or the movies, it's television.'

"But I don't think newsletters will 'graduate' into internet publishing the same way. They will go on much as they have."

Missing the 'big idea' person

"You need a person with a big idea. You can see them over the history of magazines. In the '20s Henry Luce at Time, Harold Ross at The New Yorker, DeWitt Wallace at the Reader's Digest. Years later, Hugh Hefner discovered you could sell sex 'respectably' (like a brothel with no upstairs), and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone showed you could mirror the entire popular culture through music.

"I don't think the equivalent person for internet publishing has yet arrived. The problem is newsletters need a high yield while internet publishing could be priced very low. If you could sell information on the internet for pennies a day, you could be incredibly rich due to its broad reach--newsletters at a lower unit price. If I knew how, I would do it."

On the brighter side

"The business-to-business newsletter is a marvelous thing. It brings an intensity of coverage that trade magazines, which are both slow and disinclined to upset the establishment, don't equal. They still pioneer critical stories, and that isn't going to change."

King also believes that "paper is here to stay. People have a deep, cultural attachment to it. It's convenient. It's portable. Fifty percent of our electronic subscribers still insist on receiving a paper copy. Investigative reporting may belong on paper. The internet, like TV, has an impermanence, it floats into the ether. * It may be great for covering live action but not for critical investigative reporting."

In summation, Llewellyn King said, "And I must conclude that for 30 years, newsletter publishing has been quite kind to me."

1325 0 St., NW, #1003, Washington, DC 20005, 202-638-4260, fax [phone], www.kingpublishing.com

* The Newsletter on Newsletters recently experienced the truth of this statement of Llewellyn King's. We advertised in an online twice-monthly newsletter and received all of our responses to the ad on the day of and the one day after publication. The same ad in a print newsletter would have had a much longer tail.