Back issues.

• Author: King, Wayne
• Position: 15th anniversary of Business North Carolina - Includes opinions of 12 industry leaders - Cover Story - Company Profile

It started out little but always talked big - the first 15 years of a bodacious business magazine.

BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA is 15 years old this month, and that is a remarkable achievement. Magazines have a terrible mortality rate. Only about one in 10 survive more than five years, and many, many die as infants, gone from the scene before the typical toddler utters his first word, victims of every ailment from initial capital malnutrition to the caprices of ever-fickle reader taste.

That a bumptious, narrowly targeted regional business publication survived, much less enjoyed the acclaim of more than two dozen national awards during the last decade, is testament to many things, not the least of which was an exploding state and regional economy so volatile and kaleidoscopic that even the optimistic founders of the magazine underestimated it. What mystic, for example, could have foreseen that Charlotte alone would be the cradle of not one but two of the nation's biggest banking giants or that by the mid-'90s each would employ as many Tar Heel workers as venerable R.J. Reynolds - oops, make that RJR Nabisco.

But publishing a magazine, like every human endeavor from making love and war to downsizing a factory, is not about bedrooms or guns or nuts and bolts or waffles and widgets. Like business itself, a business magazine is about the people who make it work, and as with every successful enterprise, there are scores, hundreds, even thousands of them. At BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA, they are the writers and photographers and graphic designers and editors and even the readers and certainly the advertisers, those who are written about and those who write about them and those who pay good money to sell their products in its pages.

gut more than any of the others, two people of similar backgrounds, blue-blooded thoroughbreds born into publishing families, are critical to the creation and midterm survival of the magazine. A third, a pony-tailed son of the working class, has held the magazine to its present course for most of the last decade and, barring the kind of upheavals all too common in the unpredictable business of publishing a magazine, will be at its helm for the foreseeable future.

Others played critical supporting roles, among them a slash-and-burn writer whose work ran off some of the magazine's biggest advertisers and a cameo appearance by an aging wunderkind and hired gun who made his name bucking up Hugh Hefner's tottering Playboy empire and who breezed into the staid Queen City in an ascot and black leather trousers to spiff up the magazine's appearance and, not incidentally, to advise that its founder be given a golden but very definite handshake of farewell.

He had the right genes for the job when he decided to start a business magazine in the spring of 1981, but Whitney Shaw, then 28 years old, hadn't been sure he wanted a career in journalism, much less as a publisher. When your dad, Raymond Shaw, is president and CEO of Dow Jones & Co. and your uncle Gaylord is at that very moment winning a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, it's a bit intimidating.

With that kind of background, if you make it as a journalist, so what. Everyone will just say it figures - you had all the advantages. If you fall on your face, you're the family ne'er-do-well. "For the better part of my high-school and college years," he says today, "I would have never considered going into journalism."

Even after a couple of summers in the mail room of The Wall Street Journal (for some reason, they always put the boss's kid in the mail room) and a stint on the sports desk at the Winston-Salem Journal when he was a junior at Wake Forest - he enrolled sight unseen because his high-school football coach was an alum - he still wasn't sure about a career chasing the news.

But anyone who has stood beside a huge printing press as it roars into the night, shaking the building with the next day's headlines, knows that printer's ink seeps into the blood. Whit Shaw's first fulltime job after graduation in '77 was as business editor of the Charlotte News, where he worked four years before quitting to start his business magazine. (He recalls that Rolfe Neill, publisher of the News, predicted a statewide business magazine in North Carolina would be about as successful as a Sno-Kone concession in Antarctica. But it is the Charlotte News that molders in the, grave as BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA turns a robust 15.)

Shaw even then rejected any "romantic notions," as he puts it, about publishing a magazine, especially a regional business monthly, a genre practically nonexistent at the time. The South was just becoming the Sun Belt, and Tobacco Road was not being repaved with gold. But as business editor of the News (a job that in those days ranked just above covering high-school football), he was convinced that he was at the seismic center of an economic upheaval.

During the '70s, the state had chalked up the nation's eighth-highest population growth, joining the ranks of what demographers were beginning to call the Megastates, the 10 most-populous states in the country. It had the sixth-highest increase in nonfarm jobs and by 1981 was home to 125 companies listed on the various stock exchanges. While it seems almost ludicrous to boast of it today, Tar Heels were proud that three of the banks headquartered in the state were among the nation's 60 largest. Two now stand among the top 10.

Even so, North Carolina was something of a cowlicked kid at a grown-up's cocktail party. (Let's face it, you couldn't even treat a client to a three-martini lunch before the late '70s unless you brought your own bottle.) Fifteen years ago, the Census classified nearly half the state's 5.9 million people as "rural" (and that means they truly lived in the sticks, outside towns of more than 2,500), and David Rockefeller and Guy Rothschild were not looking over their shoulders at Wachovia or NCNB. (Is that North Carolina National Bank?)

Indeed, those hot North Carolina banks were lukewarm by the high-rolling standard of the fledgling '80s, and their loan officers were not about to put up the money for a new magazine, much less a business magazine headed up by a young newspaperman with no track record as a publisher, even if he was touting his new publication as an outback clone of Forbes. "I was not modest," Shaw admits. Downright brassy, some would say. Most entrepreneurs are.

Even given his rosy view of the emerging Tar Heel business climate, no one who grew up at the knee of a publishing veteran like Shaw's daddy could be unaware of the stark realities of the business. Nothing, with the possible exceptions of wildcatting for oil or putting two bucks on the nose of a painted pony, is more treacherous. Besides the right subject matter - at last count there were about 400 computer magazines out there - you need readers and advertisers, both as predictable as summer lightning and faithful as alley cats. Not only that, just as every sadist needs a masochist, they have to match up in an arcane arena known as demographics.

You need readers, and not just any readers.

There are a lot more poor people than rich ones, but nobody puts out a magazine called Bag Lady or Panhandler, no long line of advertisers poised to advertise tin cups or tattered tennis shoes.

And you must have advertisers.

Periodicals from The New York Times to Hustler derive only a quarter to a third of their income from subscriptions and street sales. The rest comes from advertisers who want to reach the right market. Ever wonder why The New York Times has such a hefty book section or why there are all those glittering ads for $5,000 Cartier watches around Christmas time? Because at one end of the Times demographic there are a lot of very bright but struggling types - teachers, poets and the like, who put a lot of their skimpy budgets into books. At the other end are a few of the very rich, looking for just the right gift for the man or woman who has everything - except maybe a diamond-studded wristwatch. Which is why the Times can afford to sell a newspaper that costs $2 a copy to produce for half a buck.

Whitney Shaw took that concept a crucial step further. He reasoned that with the right demographics - the right list of subscribers to the magazine he envisioned - advertisers would pay a premium to reach them. So much of a premium, in fact, that they would pay the entire tab for putting out the magazine. He would give it away.

It was hardly a new concept. Shopping-center throwaways had been around since the '50s, and before cable and pay-per-view radically changed the game, radio and TV were wholly underwritten by advertisers. But they usually went for the lowest common denominator. The audience Shaw wanted was small, elite and hard to reach: He wanted corporate executives and corporate buyers. He would target them statewide the way trade magazines targeted their controlled circulation within an industry segment.

He didn't need a lot, 20,000 or so in the entire state. But finding them and getting a magazine off the presses to present to them free would take sizable seed money. Ray Shaw, who as president of Dow Jones presided over what was and still is the savviest purveyor of bottom-line business information in the world, thought enough of the concept and of the Tar Heel State, not to mention his son and heir, to put up the lion's share.

He ponied up $350,000. Other family members invested lesser sums, and Charlotte-based Kitty Hawk Capital took a flyer for $150,000, though it bowed out a year later when courtly gentleman entrepreneur Earl Slick of Winston-Salem (and Flying Tiger airline and Valvoline) agreed to underwrite that amount after the venture-capital firm got antsy over cash flow. All told, start-up money came to well under three quarters of a million, a very skinny shoestring on which to start and sustain a magazine through the first three years, considered the minimum for a new...