When David Adler launched his event-planning site BizBash in early 2001, the economic climate for new Web publications -- especially ones about parties and events -- was less than welcoming.

The recession was already cutting into conferences and major event budgets, not to mention the big drop-off in sponsorships and attendance. By some estimates, particularly in the hard-hit technology trade business, attendance and sponsorships are off by 50 to 60 percent compared to 18 months ago.

But Adler, who has worked for years as a corporate event planner, stayed focused on the New York market, where 100,000-plus major events each year generates an estimated $4 billion in sales of goods and services.

Using e-mail marketing campaigns to drive traffic to the BizBash.com site and word-of-mouth networking, BizBash.com built a newsletter following of about 50,000 and is now a thriving online publication about the events industry.

Now, as the events and hospitality industry here galvanizes to promote New York as a destination in the aftermath of September 11, Adler is readying the other half of online media property: a newspaper targeted to the event, meeting and hospitality industry.

Media recession? What media recession? "People still have to have events," says Adler, the founder and CEO of the BizBash Idea Center. "Caterers still have to market themselves, venues have to market themselves."

Indeed, after September 11, the plan to launch the newspaper version of the Web site became more urgent as the hospitality and events industry woke up to how interrelated, yet fragmented, it had become.

BizBash Event Style Reporter is slated to roll off the presses in early March as a quarterly, controlled circulation newspaper of about 20,000. It is targeting events planners, service providers, CEOs and the "inner planner in all of us."

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Originally planned as a 40 page tabloid, BizBash Event Style Reporter will come to market at 60 pages instead, thanks to advertising interest that filled 38 pages.

They include New Jersey's Liberty Science Center, Big City Graphics, Lillian Vernon (which markets trinkets for event marketing), the Jacob Javits Convention Center, cruise lines and service providers such as catering companies.

"We're creating a whole new class of advertisements geared for the event industry," says Adler. "We'll be using both media properties to sell each other."

His marketing plan comes right out of the offline-online synergy playbook. He'll use the print publication to promote the BizBash Web site as a tool for readers to search databases about specialized vendors, ideas for their events, and information on how professional planners are cutting costs.

The BizBash site and e-mail newsletters are promoting the free signups to the publication, which will be distributed to hotels, and other select venues around the city.

After one e-mail marketing campaign helped drive over 3,000 people to sign up for one of BizBash's own networking events, Adler says he was emboldened about pushing out the offline component of his publication. And he's made sure that the ad packages for the Web site, such as banners, sitelets, priority on listings in databases, tie in with the the print publication's ad packages.

His move is similar to other small sites that, having built a solid online following, are hoping to drive readers to pick up a similar publication offline.

The debut publication will feature the top 100 events in New York, including where such perennials as the New York City Marathon and rank in attendance and in business they bring in to the city.

Armed with knowledge that the largest single conference in New York is not a technology confab, but the annual gathering of the dentistry industry (50,000-plus attendees), Adler is staying optimistic.

After all, he remembers his days when, as a corporate event planner with a six-figure budget to spend, he had a hard time finding information on where he could buy goods and services for his events.

"We also realized that the advertising we were looking for is endemic, localized. This paper is all regional, all New York City focused."

After launching the BizBash.com site at the worst possible time, he says launching an advertising-supported publication doesn't scare him now. "It can only go up," he says of the market.