Atlantans Ed and Sheila Hula turned their passion for the Olympics into a profession.

Around the Rings, their all-Olympics-all-the-time publication, started as an insert in political columnist Bill Shipp's newsletter and evolved into a newsletter that was mailed, then faxed, then e-mailed, to subscribers. Its current incarnation, online at www.aroundtherings.com, allows the Hulas to reach a global audience.

STEVE C WILSON/AP (ENLARGE)

Ed and Sheila Hula's publication, Around the Rings, brought them to the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. The couple also will be going to Beijing this summer with a staff.

Ben Gray / bgray@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Ed and Sheila Hula used Atlanta playing host to the 1996 Olympics to capitalize on their interest in the Games. The result: Around the Rings, an online publication.

LIVING Latest Headlines: Zoo raises $40K in campaign to keep pandas  Georgia Aquarium to welcome 10 millionth visitor  Aquarium adds 4 sandbar sharks to exhibit  Cellphones serve as '$300 baby rattle'  Athens ranked among best places to live  • More Living Stories • Living photo galleries • Georgia Aquarium news and photos • Zoo Atlanta news and photos

"It's a niche," said Ed Hula during an interview in his Peachtree Street office. "We're focusing on one industry that was underserved."

Content on the Web site is available to subscribers who pay $249 a year (a two-month subscription is $79.95).

"I wasn't thinking much past 1996," Hula said. "It was slow initially. The work I was doing with Around the Rings was not a money maker in the early days. That didn't really happen until around 2000."

Today, the publication reaches readers in 150 countries, and logs 2.5 million hits by 100,000 unique visitors per month. The Hulas, who are taking a handful of staffers with them to Beijing, expect a spike in August.

"Through sheer hard work and determination, Ed Hula has become a key source for information on the Olympic Games," said political columnist Dick Yarbrough, who handled public relations for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

Over the past 15 years the Hulas' two-person operation has blossomed into a staff of between 17 and 20, with employees working out of their Atlanta headquarters and points around the world.

"It used to be Ed and me for a long time," Sheila Hula said. Their son, Edward Hula III, 22, who's finishing a political science/philosophy degree at Georgia State University, is a staff member.

The Hulas — he's a New Yorker who grew up in Florida, she's from Montana — moved to Atlanta in the 1980s for jobs with CNN. They met when both were working as CNN producers, and saw the coming Atlanta Olympics as a way to capitalize on their interest in the Games.

"I was trying to look for something to make a mark with other than just to produce more newscasts," Ed Hula said. "The Olympics presented itself as an opportunity."

His Olympics interest was less about sports and more about spectacle.

"I've always been interested in politics and government and how they intersect," he said. "The Olympics were a place where all that happened."

Ask most folks what they recall from the Atlanta Olympics and most will remember the highs like Kerri Strug's heroic vault on an injured ankle, and the tragic bombing in Centennial Olympic Park. The overall legacy?

"Despite Atlanta being maligned for the commercial activity that overtook downtown, it provided a festival," Hula said. "They were able to produce smoothly run sports events."

Around the Rings' office decor includes memorabilia such as collectible pins, Olympic torches, and a plaque from the 2004 ceremony installing a new Olympics committee in Iraq. But where's Izzy, the much-derided mascot of the Atlanta Games?

"It's around here somewhere," said Hula, who has little good to say about the notorious marketing disaster. "I don't know what we did with it."