Around The Rings.com - History

History

Beginning in 1992, Ed Hula formed Radio Atlanta to provide radio networks in the U.S. with reporting about the 1996 Olympics. Hula has provided coverage about every Olympics since Barcelona.

From 1994 to 1996, he was the Olympics correspondent for WGST, the official “information station” for the Atlanta Games.

From 1998 to 2001 he was based in Sydney as the Olympics editor for Radio 2UE, the rights-holding radio station for the 2000 Olympic Games.

Even in the mid-1990s, Hula was in the vanguard of new media, when he served as AOL’s Olympics reporter in Atlanta.

While delivering his radio coverage to clients worldwide, Hula realized there was a need for specialized business news about the Olympics .

In the mid-1990s, he was asked to write a column for a weekly political newsletter that was mailed out across the Southeast. “The Hula Report”, as it was known, soon outgrew its one-page space allotment and became its own four- to eight-page fax distributed twice monthly.

By 1998 electronic technology and delivery platforms were becoming increasingly important. ATR’s website, launched in late 1996, was already becoming a powerful point of delivery. As the fax expanded to 12 to 16 pages, it became necessary to convert the publication to an email format – and to open an office in Sydney, Australia, to cover the Games of 2000. Sydney was a watershed for Around the Rings. It also resulted in phenomenal growth for their readership as well as the range of their publications.

The Nagano Olympics in 1998 were a milestone for Around the Rings and the Olympics when Ed Hula became the first New Media journalist accredited for the Games.