Upstarts: Year 2000

The founder of Y2K News magazine explains why his millennium bug publication will survive past 1999. Plus, several shorter articles about how companies are tapping the millennium gold mine.

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" Magazine makes hay of millennium mania"

A publisher in Tennessee attempts to parlay year-2000 phobias into a long-term biweekly appealing to 'techies'

By Ilan Mochari

Tim Wilson drops by the brown-brick First American National Bank branch in Crossville, Tenn. (population 8,575), just about every day to deposit his company's receipts and schmooze with the bankers. "My daddy taught me long ago: stay friendly with the bankers," says Wilson, a veteran publisher of three trade magazines. In November 1997 he shared with a First American banker his latest idea: he wanted to start a biweekly magazine covering computer problems related to the end of the millennium. The banker wondered, recalls Wilson, why he would want to start something with such a short life span.

Despite the banker's misgivings, Wilson kicked off his Y2K News Magazine in July. Even though the shelf life of his business seems limited, he holds that unlike many other millennium-inspired enterprises, his will thrive far beyond the year 2000. Y2K News is part of a wave of varied start-ups that are cashing in on the millennium. Many are grappling with the calendar-related computer glitches that threaten to disrupt the world on January 1, 2000; others are selling products like freeze-dried foods and water pumps to survivalists who are preparing for doomsday scenarios.

With the millennium still a year away, Y2K News is already a hit, says Wilson, although he will not reveal its profits. During the magazine's first four months, 8,000 subscribers signed on, most of them at $55.95 for 38 issues. Although ad revenues were modest at first, some Y2K-oriented businesses--such as Stor-Tite Containers, based in Grants Pass, Ore., which sells dehydrated food and storage containers--have become steady advertisers, according to the publisher.

Wilson, 40, who has a civil-engineering degree and an M.B.A. from Tennessee Tech, has been putting out trade magazines since 1987. In his role as the publisher of the Trades Publishing Co., which produces The Resort Trades, he planned a roundtable for a resort owners' trade show in late 1997 about all things Y2K. Afterward, he concluded that he should start a magazine covering the same subject.

A prompt launch became his priority. By doubling up the magazine's operations with those of his trade-publishing business, which generates $2 million in revenues and employs 19, he saved time and the costs of office space, equipment and personnel. Wilson simply hired an editor and a subscriptions person before rolling out Y2K News.

The magazine is off to a snappy start, but the question remains: How many of its readers--Wilson identifies them as "techies," survivalists and religious adherents, among others--will stick with it into the new millennium? Inevitably, Wilson concedes, it will lose some of its audience, but he insists that some information technology specialists, at least, will stay aboard. Wilson says he'll preserve Y2K News as a straight information technology magazine next year, and on his Web site he is already "romancing" readers to stay with him for the long haul.

Not everyone believes he will succeed at that. Investors are skeptical about the prospects of Y2K magazines, according to Mark Edmiston, a magazine consultant and a former president of Newsweek. "No one wants to spend the money on something that could be a nonissue after December 31, 1999," Edmiston says. Wilson does have at least one competitor, Year/2000 Journal, a bimonthly technical magazine that claims a circulation of 35,000. But its publisher, Bob Thomas, says the chances are only 50-50 that his magazine will continue beyond the year 2000--a question that depends on advertising dollars.

Wilson, in contrast, admits to no doubts about his magazine's long-term prospects. If his optimism is borne out, Y2K News will peak with 20,000 subscribers late this year and retain about 5,000 of them into the new millennium. The only dark cloud Wilson acknowledges is the doomsday view of some of his readers. If they're right about the next millennium, he says, chuckling, "I won't be able to get a magazine to anyone."

Brand equity at last
Hitching a brand to global extravaganzas like the Olympics or the Super Bowl is, of course, a periodic marketing rite reserved almost entirely for heavyweight companies such as McDonald's or Anheuser-Busch.

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