Warren Communications News slowly moves away from direct mail to direct sales and from print to online publishing. (Publisher Profile).

By current standards, Paul Warren, president of Warren Communications News in Washington, D.C., is positively bullish when he says that the company is "doing fine."

"Take Communications Daily," he says. "Besides World-com and the ones you've seen on the front page, there have been maybe 60 bankruptcies in the business, but they aren't our core market. That's the Washington government-relations outfits and law firms. They don't go away; in fact, they're reporting record revenues."

Marketing

"We've shifted away from direct mail to direct sales. I have a sales force of five now and their principal focus is on getting additional subscriptions and site licenses from the existing customers to our three dailies. From our offices they could walk to many of our subscribers along the K Street corridor," Warren laughs, "but they don't want to see us in their offices--they're happy to deal with us on the phone."

Besides Communications Daily now priced at $3,700 annually, Warren also publishes Consumer Electronics Daily ($1,445/year) and Washington Internet Daily ($2, 195/year), which covers "the internet and the regulation thereof ... you know Washington, once they get their finger in something, they never go away," Warren says.

About 50 percent of the subscribers to Communications Daily receive it online. Consumer Elections Daily is entirely online. "Subscribers are spread all over the country. We could never have handled the fulfillment with a print edition." And while Washington Internet Daily actually began as a print publication, it too has shifted heavily to online delivery.

Most titles "way down"

Now for the less happy news. Subscriptions to Warren's flagship, Television Digest, and just about all of the remaining titles, about 20 in all, are "way down." It may be, Warren agrees, that the dailies are largely impervious to online competition because you can't the information any quicker on the internet.

Warren Communications has also published the Television and Cable Factbook directory since 1946 and it is now about to make it available for the first time as an online database. "People just don't buy directories the way they used to," Warren says. "We can hold on to many of the subscribers we have, but getting new ones, well...." (Here the company continues to use direct mail.)

Manage smarter

"What we've been able to do in this area is manage smarter," Warren says of directory publishing. "We have pretty much out-sourced the compilation work on the directory We once had I think 22 people working on it and the total is now eight."

"As to a side benefit to this change, we are about to get rid of our Wang word processing system in-house that we have had since 1979. I think we've gotten our money's worth from it," Warren says wryly.

"We've tightened our operations all around. I know we have fewer employees that we did 10 or even five years ago. We have more reporters, but fewer 'others,"' Warren says.

The kind of guy you want watching your costs

"Printing is a depressed area in Washington, and you can hold their feet to the fire and get some real savings there. For the whole area of savings, though, I have to tip my hat to our comptroller, Brig Easley, who's been with us for 25 years. Brig never carries money with him because he doesn't want to spend it, and he works at a desk he built himself from scrap lumber and odd parts. That's the kind of guy you want watching your costs."

Special report business gone to hell

"High-price, single subject special reports are another area of our business that has gone to hell. We'd pick a company or a subject and compile literally everything about it in a one-source publication and then market it to our subscribers. We still have about three and a half people working in this area, but the demand just isn't there anymore. I'd say they're in danger of moving from what I call the 'pound puppies' that we aren't sure we can keep alive to our 'loseum' of titles we no longer publish," Warren says.

Two generations of Warrens

Warren Communicatons president Paul Warren and his brother, vice chairman and executive editor Daniel Warren, are second generation publishers. Their father, Albert Warren, began writing for Television Digest in 1946, his first job out of the Navy.

He purchased the publication in 1961 and after a number of launches and acquisitions changed the name of the company to Warren Publishing Inc. and bought a building in downtown Washington. More recently, they took the name of Warren Communications News--one of the most respected trade publishers in the Washington area.

"I should add," Paul Warren says, "that my dad, Al Warren, is still in the office regularly. He's 82 now--he shares the exact same birthday as the Pope--and he reads copy everyday.

"But he's not our oldest employee, Sam Sharkey, who retired as an FCC information officer in 1982, is 86. He works for us on a contractor basis as a copy editor."

2115 Ward Court, NW Washington, DC 20037, 202-872-9200, fax [phone], www.warren-news.com