Taking a Chance on a Lottery Magazine

A magazine devoted to the lottery? We laugh, naturally. But since Dynamic World Distributors Inc., the publisher of LottoWorld magazine, went public in March, it has raised $7 million.

The digest-sized LottoWorld plans to add 19 biweekly regional editions by the end of summer, including a California edition scheduled for launch in mid-June. Three of the industry’s biggest distributors have been enlisted to ensure choice display at convenience stores, supermarkets and other outlets.

“We’re not saying you should play Lotto,” said LottoWorld Editor in Chief Rich Holman. “We’re saying that if you do play, you should play to win.”

Articles appearing in LottoWorld’s four existing editions fall into three basic categories: advice (“hot numbers” being picked around the country), features (about new millionaires) and news about the various games.

According to Holman, 37 states offer lottery games, which last year generated $30 billion in spending by 60 million people.

In short: a potentially larger-than-niche audience for LottoWorld, which is based in Naples, Fla., and expects to reach 300,000 in circulation by the end of June.

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Andy’s War: Andy Rooney has generated a bunch of news stories in recent weeks by bluntly criticizing his boss, CBS chairman Laurence Tisch.

News it may be, but new it is not. Rooney, the popular commentator on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” has publicly vented his views about Tisch, CBS and other topics many times during his long career.

What is new is “My War” (Times Books), the former sergeant’s memoir of the three years he covered World War II for the Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper. He won a Bronze Star for reporting under fire at Saint-Lo in France.

Viewers of his often-humorous essays on Sunday evenings may be unprepared for the images that run through the narrative. He recalled the crash-landing in England of a B-17 that had a gunner trapped inside the ball-turret hanging below the aircraft. “We all watched in horror as it happened,” he wrote. “We watched as this man’s life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber.”

As a correspondent aboard a bombing run into Germany, he saw other American planes hit by fire from the ground. “The long, slow, death spiral of a bomber with its crew on board is a terrible thing to see,” he observed. One “exploded into fragments . . . and it was impossible to tell the parts of machinery from the bodies of men as they all tumbled toward earth.”

Seated in his CBS office the other morning, a Slinky on his desk and an old Underwood typewriter at his side, Rooney said, “I saw the worst of the war. I saw everything bad.”

At the same time, Rooney is quick to express how lucky he and so many others were to be part of such an adventure, including the jubilant liberation of Paris and the somber entry into Buchenwald.

“You were so full of life, doing so many things and living at full speed,” he said. His work for the Stars and Stripes put him in touch with the prolific Ernie Pyle, a young wire-service reporter named Walter Cronkite and Ernest Hemingway, described in “My War” as an impossible blowhard.

Days after the release of “My War,” there reportedly are up to 80,000 copies in circulation after two printings.

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Afterwords: “Hoop Dreams” was a grass-roots favorite to win an Oscar this year. But the documentary about two high school basketball standouts, their families and dreams of glory fell short of being nominated--to the amazement of the film’s fans and the critics who loved it.

Comes the spring and “Hoop Dreams” has been turned into a hardcover book, written by journalist Ben Joravsky. Charles Barkley supplies a short introduction. Turner Publishing Inc., a subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting, is the publisher.

* Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His column, published Fridays, is going on hiatus and will return in a few weeks.