Rocky Mountain high - two new Colorado-based magazines launched

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 15, 1994 by Susan Hovey

"A lot of people told me when I moved out here that they thought I had killed my career," says Bob Kaslik, president of Leman Publications, a subsidiary of Emmaus, Pennsylvania-based Rodale Press. Kaslik joined Leman three years ago following its sale to Rodale, where he had been head of circulation. Leman, which publishes Quilter's Newsletter Magazine (225,000 circulation) and Quiltmaker (125,000), in addition to running a mail-order catalog division, recently relocated from Wheat Ridge to Golden, about 15 minutes west of Denver and home to Coors Brewing Co.

Since Kaslik arrived, Leman has grown from 52 to 75 employees and is on track to double its 1992 revenues this year, projecting in excess of $14 million. Nice way to kill a career. "I have no regrets," he says. "People work hard here, but I think there's a better balance between work and non-work activities."

From Aspen (an artistically inspired title that has tripled its gross revenues to more than $1 million over the past five years) to Zymurgy (the official magazine of the American Home Brewers Association), Colorado publishing offers something for everyone's tastes. But it's the hardcore enthusiast magazines like Climbing and Rock & Ice that really capture the true flavor of the region. That spirit of adventure to which Kaslik refers is reflected in the day-to-day operations of many Colorado publishing outfits, especially those in the fitness mecca of Boulder, home to many world-class athletes and a population that--as The New York Times Sunday Magazine put it a few years back--can't sit still. This is a city with 23 bike shops for 90,000 people.

Companies like Sports & Fitness Publishing, parent of Women's Sports & Fitness and Inline (for the inline skating crowd); Inside Communications, publisher of Inside Triathlon and the biking tabloid VeloNews; and New Hope Communications, a trade outfit whose titles include Natural Foods Merchandiser and Delicious!, all embody an entrepreneurial ethos not often on display in Manhattan publishing circles. (You could even make a case for Soldier of Fortune, the embattled renegade title that focuses on slightly different athletic and entrepreneurial endeavors.)

"If I were the Chamber of Commerce, I'd go after publishers," says Inside Communications president Felix Magowan. "This is the easiest city in the world to move people to." If the Chamber were smart, it would hire Magowan. He reels off statistics about Boulder like he's part of the local welcome wagon, starting with the city's telecommunications infrastructure and its impressive list of corporate residents. Several companies, such as Apple Computer and Knight-Ridder, operate media labs in Boulder, IBM runs a software-development facility there, and US West has an R&D think tank. Down the road 25 miles to the southeast in Denver are cable king TeleCommunications Inc. and the software programmers at Quark. And in the Boulder suburb of Louisville, there's subscription-fulfillment giant Neodata. The area isn't lacking for ad agencies and color separators, either.

"This is really a communications hub," says New Hope CEO Doug Green, who moved his company to Boulder from New Hope, Pennsylvania, five years ago, in part because of the city's status as a natural foods center. "I think a lot of communications companies are going to come here, magazines being one of them." Green says he thinks the new and much-maligned Denver International Airport, with or without its $200 million baggage-eating system, will be a boon to business when it finally opens.

Most would agree that finding talent here is not a problem. "Boulder is the world capital of people who want to work part-time," says Green. And once you get past its New Age exterior (some days, you can actually smell the patchouli wafting through the air along the pedestrian mall on Pearl Street, and local shop clerks have a tendency to ask, "Would you like your receipt, or should I recycle that for you?"), Boulder has some serious brain power. Either that or a bunch of people who don't know what to do with their lives: Something like 40 percent of the residents hold graduate degrees.

Local real estate prices have risen sharply in recent years--along with the influx of Californians eager to escape natural and man-made disasters. (An estimated 43,000 people fled the Golden State for Colorado between July 1993 and July 1994.) But Boulder County's average house price of $173,730 is still a relative bargain compared to those in the more affluent suburbs of New York City.

And all those quality-of-life factors are hard to ignore: not one reported murder in 1993, practically 300 days of sunshine a year; 25,000 acres of designated open space; miles of biking, hiking and running trails; the splendor of the Flatirons, a dramatic group of foothills that provide the city's western boundary and a glimpse of things to come 45 minutes to the northwest in Rocky Mountain National Park. It's that backyard thing again.

The name rings a bell