In eighth grade Elie Ashery used to skateboard in the parking lot of newsletter company Phillips Publishing Inc. in Potomac. Now, at 23, he and an old schoolmate, Ari Jacoby, are running a business that's designed to take newsletters into the next generation.

Newsletters.com of College Park, formerly Fination.com, is an online clearinghouse for investment newsletters. People visit the site, see ads for different letters and subscribe online for electonic or paper delivery. The site splits the subscription fees 50-50 with the publishers.

"To the publishers, it amounts to an instant Web presence," said Jacoby, who is chief executive of the company. It now has 135 financial newsletters from 60 publishers -- such titles as the BuyBack Letter, Prudent Speculator and Zacks Advisor -- on its site.

These two local boys -- Jacoby, 23, went to Georgetown University and Ashery to the University of Maryland -- originally thought they'd build a stock-tracking World Wide Web site to compete with the likes of Quote.com. Then they realized it's easy to get free stock quotes on the Internet but much more difficult to find reliable analysis of publicly traded companies.

And newsletters, an often lucrative publishing niche, are not readily available online. In part that's because they are run by companies not known for technology savvy. Perhaps more important, it's because newsletter executives are famous for their fear of copyright infringement and often sue when their newsletters are illegally photocopied.

So the Internet, where information can be copied with a few strokes at a keyboard and distributed all over the globe, may not seem like a logical place for newsletters.

Hoping to assuage the concerns of publishers, Newsletters.com is designing software that will encrypt newsletters so that subscribers can read them but can't copy and distribute them freely over the Internet. That software will be ready in three or four months, Jacoby said. In the meantime, newsletters are going out to subscribers in unscrambled form.

Any newsletter executive who won't go digital is living in the dark ages, said Jacoby, chatting in the company's '70s-era offices near the University of Maryland. "If the newsletter industry doesn't shift online, there will be no newsletter industry," he said.

Big words from a little company. The year-old Newsletters.com is projecting 1998 revenue at just $50,000, though Jacoby said he expects the business to be profitable by the second quarter of 1999.

The operation got major validation this year when the company attracted its first money from "angels," private investors who seek out infant companies. Putting up funds were two of the best-known such cherubim in Washington, both of whom made their money from cashing out of pioneering technology firms -- Digex Group founder Doug Humphrey and Jeff Osborn, one of the original vice presidents at UUNet Technologies Inc.

Jacoby admits Newsletters.com was a persistent pest trying to get these two to invest.

Humphrey was in the audience at a private meeting of angels earlier this year at which Jacoby made a pitch for funds. "I sounded like a used-car salesman," Jacoby said last week. "Doug said, 'This is very bad.' . . . Then he spent 3 1/2 hours with us reshaping our speech."

"Their chutzpah is the ultimate thing," Humphrey said in an interview.

It even shows in how the company changed its name. Jacoby said the previous owner of the Newsletters.com name was a computer hacker to whom he paid $5,000 to give up the rights to the Web address, money the hacker needed for his legal defense fund. "It took us a month to catch up to him," Jacoby said.

Now Osborn and Humphrey, both on the company's board of directors, are helping Newsletters.com in its search for its first financing from venture capital funds, which they hope will amount to $10 million to $12 million.

Osborn said the trend of people investing online automatically creates a huge need for reliable financial information on the Internet.

"Any time there's a big change in the way billions of dollars are spent, there's a big opportunity," Osborn said. "The kids just lucked into being in the right place."

But Jacoby admits that it's a hard sell convincing a newsletter publisher that letting his information out on the Internet is a good idea.

"It freaks them out a lot at first," he said. "They're mom-and-pop shops. There's such a gap between technology and this industry."

Linda Meyer, vice president at Portland, Ore., newsletter firm Red Chip Review, was one who had those fears. "We had been worried" about copyright infringement on the Internet, she said.

But Meyer said she had to get over that: "Our future is not in a print version of our product but from the ad revenue of a Web version." Meyer signed up with Newsletters.com a few months ago.

For the record, Phillips Publishing is not a customer of Newsletters.com -- but Jacoby is targeting it.

With the venture capital they hope to raise, Jacoby and Ashery said, they will expand the business to other kinds of newsletters, such as health care, law and insurance. "We'll be a niche portal," Jacoby said.

The venture capital also will help the two executives do something else they've been wanting to do for a long time -- move out of their parents' houses.