Daily Paperless : Greenwire Helps Blaze Trail in Electronic Publishing
When Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt wanted to leak his proposed new national grazing laws to the media last month, he had one news organ in mind.
It wasn’t the Washington Post. It wasn’t one of the Big Three evening news broadcasts. It wasn’t even CNN. Important as it was to Babbitt to reach the right audience--policy-makers, interest groups and other influential environmental players--he took his story to Greenwire.
The daily newsletter covering the environment is noteworthy not just for its influence, but because of how it’s delivered. You can get it as electronic mail. You can get it by fax. You can even search its database for the information you need.
The one thing Greenwire isn’t is printed, which makes it a good example of a growing new kind of publishing, one that is paperless, interactive, highly focused--and very high-priced.
Greenwire doesn’t depend on any futuristic vision of the information superhighway. Instead, it uses established electronic delivery means. Its paperlessness means that no money or time is wasted on printing or mailing, which seems particularly apt for a publication devoted to the environment.
In many ways, Greenwire is a traditional news organization. Every morning at 5, the first of its eight employees arrives in the Washington-area office in jeans and sneakers to cull about 130 news sources, including television and radio transcripts, trade magazines, government reports, dozens of regional newspapers and items sent in by its international “stringers” to distill the day’s environmental coverage--news on politics, technology and regulation.
Editors also add a smattering of news analyses and interviews. By 10 a.m., they’ve put together what would be a 12-page briefing, which subscribers can retrieve electronically (via the Internet, for example) or have faxed directly by the folks at Greenwire.
Greenwire is nothing if not focused. Circulation is only about 1,500, but as far as Babbitt was concerned, they are the right 1,500. Subscribers include the White House, Congress, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as trade organizations and grass-roots groups; corporations such as Coca-Cola Co., Dow Chemical Co. and Toyota Motors Corp., and news organizations such as ABC, CNN and the Washington Post.
Narrowcasting is a growth business for companies such as Greenwire, which provides readers with information they apparently need at a level of convenience and coherence they evidently can’t get elsewhere.
“I think publishing electronically is the way of the future of journalism,” says Greenwire’s publisher, Phillip Shabecoff, who launched the newsletter in 1991. “Even newspapers will have to do that to survive in the next century. We’re even more on the cutting edge, because we’re closely focused. As society gets increasingly overwhelmed by a flood of data, people will pay for condensed, specific information.”
And pay they do. Corporations shell out between $1,495 and $3,000 yearly for the daily briefing. Federal departments, which often distribute Greenwire via computer to more than one office, pay as much as $6,000, and Congress pays even more. (Greenwire won’t say how much.)
For its biggest subscriber, the Edison Electric Institute, Greenwire compiles its own subsidiary daily briefing, the six-page Energy News, which the trade group shares with its member utilities at a cost of more than $100,000 a year. Greenwire also allows subscribers, at a fee of 80 cents a minute, to search its database for news items. The service is available to non-subscribers at double the rate, plus a $100 initiation fee.
Greenwire isn’t unique. In recent years, many writers and publishers have taken to distributing market-specific newsletters by modem or fax. And as fax modems and membership to services such as CompuServe have grown common in offices and households, publishers distribute these newsletters via electronic bulletin board systems and fax broadcast services, which allow a publisher to fax a document to a single computer. The service bureau then disseminates it to a subscriber list by fax.
Publications--from free “fanzines” to investment newsletters such as the Princeton Portfolio (a weekly costing $225 a year, published by Forbes columnist Michael Gianturco) to articles from established periodicals such as the New Republic--can all be accessed by modem. Such enterprises almost change the meaning of publishing, often allowing consumers to decide what information they will receive.
Shabecoff, a reporter who covered Vietnam and the White House for the New York Times, was the paper’s environmental correspondent from 1977 to 1991, when the Times took him off the beat. At the time, Shabecoff claimed he’d been told his stance was “pro-environment, whatever that means.”
So he teamed with longtime Republican political consultant Doug Bailey, owner of the American Political Network, which since 1987 had been putting out Hotline, an electronic Beltway digest for policy junkies. APN also publishes Health News and Abortion Report.
“Doug Bailey and I knew there was a need for expanded information about the environment,” Shabecoff says, adding that environmental coverage “is shortchanged by many other publications. Media managers just didn’t get it; by and large, many still don’t. Even though what we do is narrowcast, many of our readers are in a position to get it out to a much wider audience.”
Bailey estimates Greenwire’s operating costs at $500,000 to $1 million a year, mainly because the newsletter can be distributed without paying for printing or delivery. It carries no advertisements--the chief source of revenue for most publications.
“Carrying ads would bring another level of issues to deal with,” says Dale Curtis, the newsletter’s co-publisher. “It would also require more staff and space.”
But not relying on ads for revenue shifts the burden of paying to the readers. Though Greenwire just in the past year began to turn a financial corner, APN’s four newsletters netted a combined profit of $600,000, about as much as it spends, on average, to operate any one of the four.
Primed for Green Mail
Paperless publishing depends upon readers equipped to receive electronic information, usually by modem or fax machine. Modems are being installed in the United States at a feverish pace. The installed base, in millions: MODEMS
1988: 8.3 1989: 10.8 1990: 13.4 1991: 15.5 1992: 17.2 1993: 18.2
FAX MACHINES
1988: 2.6 1989: 4.0 1990: 5.4 1991: 7.3 1992: 8.9 1993: 11.0
Source: Dataquest
Researched by ADAM S. BAUMAN / Los Angeles Times
