commbasics

OK, here's the civil Q&A with Paul Miller about the changes at EE Times and CMP. Not nearly as entertaining as what went on at Wednesday's Electronic Design Automation Consortium meeting, but perhaps more informative. I'm noodling on what all this means and will log in next week with a response. BTW, we're starting to line up a bunch of potential interviews for the next few weeks and you may notice that there is a definite British trend in them. Yeah, they are all Brits. I told you they were taking over media. Here's the link .

Wow. What a night. Hard to know where to begin. Let's start with the good stuff. Paul Miller addressed some 40 people representing the EDA industry to explain what the changes were in CMP and, specifically EE Times. Miller laid out a vision for modern B2B media that was, well, visionary. He documented the interrelationship between research, events, print and web communication and how CMP plans to integrate all four of those aspects into a unified machine to reach technology customers. He was also very honest about it. He said they may be making a mistake, but only time will tell. I recorded the talk and have asked for the slides and will try to boil it all down in a later post as soon as he gives me approval. If you get a chance to talk to anyone from CMP, take it. This is brave new world stuff. Then he stayed on the dais and took an hour of questions most of which were negative, occasionally whiny, and once or twice insulting. He handled it quite well. But let's j...

Just got word that the San Diego Union has cut its Personal Technology section that ran weekly. The paper wil continue to cover the subject in Business and other section and hasn't fired anyone, but if a major metro makes a move like this, that doesn't bode well for technology coverage overall. Keep your eyes open. On a high note, just finished talking with Paul Miller, president of the electronics group at CMP. I should have it up by the end of the week. There are good things happening out there.

The State of the Media, which is what this blog is all about, is pretty damned depressed, especially with the announcement of the lay off of Ed Sperling from Electronic News. Ed was, the most accomplished journalist in the electronics industry trade press that I knew, mostly because his experience was parallel to mine in our march from daily news to technology. He was just a good newsman. However, the point of this blog is not just to kvetch that media is changing but to embrace the uncertainty. And the only way to do that is to put the changes into historical context. That's why I'm encouraging all of you to get a copy of James Burke's THE KNOWLEDGE WEB. The book is actually written the way you would search the internet. There are reference numbers in the margins that divert you to other sections of the book so you can see how the web of knowledge actually develops in multiple direction. You can read the book traditionally from page one to the end. or go off in any ...

Just got an email from John Blyler that Ed Sperling and Debra Bulkeley have been laid off over at EDN/ENEws. Then saw it confirmed over at Greeley's Ghost. It's sad new but to be expected. When Reed consolidated E News and E Business into the EDN supersite, they were top heavy. Ed is a great journalist who could go anywhere. John wondered if this is another version of "the Covey effect." Interview with me and get a better job. Hope that's the case, Ed. Keep in touch.

Jordan Guthmann at Blanc and Otus started a blog on free speech recently ( link ). It's a good piece about getting over ourselves in relation to the concept of free speech. We're in a time that reminds me of America 200 years ago (no I'm not that old, I'm just an amateur historian.) Everyone was forced into politeness because of the imminent threat of a duel. You either apologized for a public slur of fought for your life. That's kind of where we are today. Apologize and be shown the lesser to the person you offended or see your career go down the drain. But as much as I agree with you, the real battle here is not freedom of speech but freedom from speech. We have come to a point in theJordansocial dialectic that we want to say what we want to say, but we don't want to hear that we upset anyone or that anyone disagrees with us. And it's on both sides of the coin. A person who wants to use a social slur in casual or public conversation, or who wants to ...

Richard Goering finally let the world know what he was up to and it's pretty much what we expected. SCDsource.com will be an online newsletter that will contain contributed articles, viewpoints and coverage of EDA industry news and technology… all the things everyone came to expect from Richard over his long career at EE Times. We don't know who else will be joining him editorially and we don't know who is funding the new venture. We do know venture capital within the EDA community is backing the play. One thing we know for sure: if the industry doesn't support this publication, it will also go away. That's what we all have to learn from this. The media does not exist on charity. Someone has to pay the bill. Every form of media needs some combination of advertising, paid subscribers and industry sponsors to survive and thrive. Advertising is the traditional media support, but the EDA and electronics industries have not been all that consistent in media support...

Got some ideas for the next post over the weekend by they will have to wait. I was on the losing end of a water fight with some teenagers at a labor day picnic and will be undergoing knee reconstruction tomorrow. In the meantime, any of you out there have any comments about the value of news releases in your marketing? How about you journalists? Do they help you much (pretty much know the answer to that one)? Your comments would make a good start of what the next post will be. See you on the other side of the anesthesia.