Up from Fugger

Characteristically, the style is staccato, bone-bare, oracular and dull. The format is uninviting; usually four letterhead-size pages printed to look as if they had come fresh from a typewriter. The contents often suggest the confidential whisper of a race-track tout. The cost can be incredibly high: as much as $125 a year for some 3,000 words a week--an annual total well below the word count in one average issue of the New York Times (185,000). Yet so insatiable is the public appetite for inside dope that in the few decades since its birth, the newsletter has flourished to become U.S. journalism's fastest-moving institution.

Anyone with a mailing list, a mimeograph and the price of some postage stamps is in business. Newsletters breed with such leporine rapidity that any nose count is outdated as soon as begun; in any given month, two dozen newsletters may spring into being, and a dozen others die. In 1943, when the Whaley-Eaton American Letter reached its 25th birthday, the editors undertook a census of their imitators, got bored and stopped counting after the total passed 700.

Madison Avenue Mutation. A great many U.S. Congressmen send newsletters home to their constituents. From Manhattan's Wall Street, and from the financial quarters of other U.S. cities, pour market newsletters by the hundreds, if not thousands, most of them free. Rare is the big bank that does not publish a newsletter; New York's First National City Bank has been distributing one since 1904, for a readership that now embraces college students, housewives, small children and Latin Americans (separate Spanish and Portuguese editions) as well as financiers and businessmen. House organs, especially those produced by Madison Avenue, have a habit of turning into newsletters--a mutation that takes place whenever the editor can claim that a few copies leave the premises.

Most newsletters start life as giveaways, begin charging readers only after they are hooked. But even if the giveaways are not counted, the list is impressive--and endless in its variety. Bernard P. Gallagher, a Manhattan magazine broker, prints the Gallagher Report, a medley of information and misinformation on magazine publishing that claims 5,500 subscribers at $12 a year. Aviation Daily, which is airmailed (naturally) to 75% of its subscribers, manages an 80% renewal rate despite one of the loftiest price tags in the profession: $220 a year. Recently, Arun Kumar Chhabra came to the U.S. from India, started a newsletter, India View, that is addressed primarily to readers of Indian extraction. There are newsletters for insurance companies (The Washington Insurance Newsletter), space businessmen (Space Business Daily), medical institutions (The Washington Report on the Medical Sciences), labor leaders (John Herling's Labor Letter) and women: the Insider's Newsletter, a Cowles publications (Look Magazine) product that includes sections beamed at both men and women.

Pointed at the Pockets. The newsletter dates from the 15th century, when a family of German financiers named Fugger began circulating a handwritten periodical throughout Middle Europe, thereby giving the gimmick a start. In 1918, when two Philadelphia journalists copied the Fugger example, they pointed the U.S.'s first commercial newsletter toward the pockets of the business community. The Whaley-Eaton American Letter is still published today, although its early success has long since been surpassed by Willard M. Kiplinger.

Beginning with the Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, onetime Associated Press Reporter Willard Kiplinger not only built the nation's largest newsletter empire but set a pattern for others to follow. There are now four Kiplinger letters--the other three are concerned with taxes, agriculture and, oddly enough, Florida. Their combined subscription count comes to 200,000 and their annual gross to $5,000,000. Kiplinger has also branched out with a magazine (Changing Times) and into book publishing.

Copied widely, Kiplinger's letters and their imitators have set into a mold that combines forecast of trends with bite-size gobbets of news chopped to fit the busy businessman's crowded schedule. "Kiplinger does for the executive," says Bernard Gallagher, "what the Reader's Digest does for the peasant." Much newsletter forecasting is done in the vague language of fortunetellers, and no newsletter turns out the double-edged style, the wise guess that can be read both ways, more assiduously than Kiplinger's Washington Letter.

For all that, the proliferation of newsletters suggests that they are filling a demand that the daily press, with its more general focus, cannot or does not satisfy. But undefined and undefinable, the news letter has yet to earn recognition in its chosen field. For years, newsletter reporters were barred from membership in Washington's National Press Club, on the specious grounds that their publications carried no advertising; newsletter reporters still are denied accreditation to the Senate and House press galleries. Whether newslettering is legitimate journalism, or promotion, or something else again, is a question that journalism itself appears unable to decide.

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