Rival 02138 Mags Planned

“The World’s Most Opinionated Zip Code” will get a little more crowded this fall when two publications launch, each bearing the name 02138.

Bom S. Kim ’00 plans to launch his bi-monthly magazine in September and hopes to supplement the University’s official alum magazine, Harvard Magazine, by profiling alums and publishing “news of interest to the alumni of Harvard University,” according to an undated private placement memorandum. The memo, obtained by The Crimson in March, said that Harvard Magazine “reads more like a collection of press releases and academic papers.”

Howard Dinin is launching a quarterly magazine late this summer, entitled 02138: Dispatches to and from the world’s most opinionated zip code. Unlike Kim’s 02138, Dinin said his magazine will not be geared to Harvard alums.

“Originally the magazine was to highlight movers and shakers in 02138—but I decided that was too provincial, so I expanded the scope and it creates a pretext for talking about anything,” Dinin said in an interview.

Kim declined to comment on the specifics of the magazine, except to respond to certain questions relating to the private placement memorandum. Kim said he has subsequently revised the March memo in many respects, but declined to provide an updated copy to The Crimson.

The two magazines, despite their differences in content, seem to target a similar set of readers—well-educated, intelligent and affluent people.

Dinin admitted that Harvard affiliates will likely make up a sizeable portion of his magazine’s readership, although they are not his target audience.

“I think [the magazine] defines an educated audience and this means middle and upper-middle class,” Dinin said. “If I was doing this magazine for Harvard alums I wouldn’t call it 02138.”

Kim’s magazine, on the other hand, almost exclusively targets Harvard affiliates and appears to follow a different business model than that of Dinin’s publication.

“Highly educated, sophisticated, and wealthy, the Harvard audience is a lucrative niche for any advertiser,” read Kim’s March memo.

Kim’s magazine, according to the memo, is seeking an investment of $60,000 for the first issue with a total startup cost of $100,000. The memo said the magazine aims to generate a substantial profit by devoting approximately 30 of its 88 glossy pages to advertisements.

“As the circulation among alumni nears 100,000 we expect revenues to exceed $3.1 million,” the memo stated.

The magazine’s first issue, according to the memo, will be distributed free of charge to 65,000 members of the Harvard community—not only to alums, but also to current students, faculty and staff. After this initial issue, alums will continue to receive the magazine free of charge, but others will have to pay $42 a year, according to Kim’s website.

Kim said that the statistics on circulation, costs and earnings presented in the memo may be outdated, but declined to comment further.

Dinin said while he wants his 02138 to be financially self-sufficient, he does not expect to reach a mass audience, or for the magazine to generate large revenues.

“This is not intended for mass distribution,” he said, “except in the folders of time.”

Dinin, who is launching his publication through a personal investment of an unspecified amount, said his 02138 will have advertisements, but that most of the revenue will come from subscriptions and sales. He suggested that his magazine’s revenue goals are more modest than that of its counterpart.

Both magazines intend to hire a small permanent staff as well as to use freelance writers.

Dinin said he was spending June in Provence, France, finalizing his plans for the quarterly magazine—which he began to assemble two years ago—when he first read about Kim’s 02138 in a Boston Globe column. While Dinin had already registered www.02138.com as a domain for his publication, Kim has filed for trademark protection for the name “02138.” For his website, Kim registered www.02138magazine.com.

With no clear agreement to which publication the name belongs, both Kim and Dinin are hoping the other goes out of business, and that the survivor can lay sole claim to the zip code.

—Staff writer Joshua P. Rogers can be reached at jprogers@fas.harvard.edu.