UPI's Latest Survival Strategy   

It will never again be like the old days, when United Press International duked it out around the world with the Associated Press in a feverish competition to break news.

But maybe, just maybe, UPI can survive, albeit in a very different form, after a staggering series of near-death experiences and last-minute rescues.

That's certainly the goal of James Adams, UPI's new CEO and a veteran British journalist. While he has no illusions that the company can regain its luster as a traditional wire service — "Are we going to rebuild ð la the 1980s? No," he says — Adams, 46, is confident that UPI can survive, and perhaps prosper, by selling international financial data via the Internet.

One of UPI's main strategies is UPI-MEMO, an online joint venture with Alexandria, Virginia-based Meridian Emerging Markets Ltd., an international financial data firm. UPI-MEMO is a Web site that will provide up-to-date financial information on 13,000 companies in 54 countries with emerging stock markets, including China, Kuwait, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Meridian and UPI-MEMO President Paul Dietrich says revenue will come from subscribers in the U.S. and Europe who are willing to pay $10,000 per year for a supplement to their business wires in developed countries. Many financial institutions and private money managers already pay for wire subscriptions to help them judge the economic climate and ultimately facilitate the decision making process for investing. Adams says his venture with Meridian, which has compiled financial reports on government spending and private companies in emerging marketplaces since its inception in 1995, will add to such services by putting financial figures in the context of a country's political and social climate, in addition to its economic outlook. UPI-MEMO, which currently is being test marketed, would establish its niche as the first Internet subscription service targeted solely for developing markets.

UPI will continue to maintain a foothold in wire reporting. But its roster of 40 international bureaus, 30 domestic ones and 258 full time employees is dwarfed by AP, which boasts 237 bureaus around the globe with input from 1,550 member newspapers, 6,000 radio and TV stations and a staff of 3,421. UPI also has been overtaken by British giant Reuters, which serves 40 percent of U.S. newspapers. While UPI would not release the number of American papers it currently serves, the New York Times reported in March that UPI has about 1,000 broadcast subscribers and 1,000 print and World Wide Web subscribers. The UPI Radio Network, which boasts about 120 affiliates, generates half the funds for the news service. Adams says UPI is in the red, but will break even next year for the first time in recent memory.

While the company's prospects may be on the upswing, some UPI veterans aren't celebrating. Former UPI correspondent Patrick Sloyan, Newsday's senior Washington correspondent, wonders if there is still a need for UPI, especially given that the wire service was all but left for dead during the past 10 years. "They've been out of the news wire reporting business for some time now," he says.

UPI hasn't had much luck with reinventing itself in the past. In 1982 UPI essentially bottomed out when two money-strapped investors bought the once-regal news wire service for one dollar. It was a sad moment for the news institution that in the 1960s had scooped the AP on the biggest news event of that decade — President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

The company continued to struggle throughout the 1980s, staving off creditors long enough to be bought in 1993 by a group of investors led by Chairman Walid Bin Ibrahim Al-Ibrahim. The Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based media empire has holdings that include the Middle East Broadcasting Center, the Network of America, Saravision Cable of Saudi Arabia and Spectrum Radio of England.

Adams brings experience to the job. Coming from London's Sunday Times, where he served as Washington Bureau Chief for the past five years and from 1989 to 1991 as defense correspondent and then managing editor, Adams oversaw the Times' $40 million-a-year operating budget and pumped new life into the financially strapped newspaper. Adams was a news editor and reporter at 8 Days magazine in London from 1978 to 1981 and has published 11 spy novels. He says he is undaunted by the challenge of resuscitating UPI. "We're going to grow the market," he says.

UPI's veteran White House bureau chief, Helen Thomas, who began working for the wire in 1943 and has covered every administration from Kennedy to Clinton, says Adams has already succeeded on one level, bringing new energy and a sense of optimism to the long-foundering company.

"We're all very happy for any new programs and ideas. We're waiting to see," Thomas says. "Hope springs eternal."