commbasics

My phone has been ringing off the hook today about UBM's decision to dump the CMP identity and create four new business units. Some of the response has been good, some bad but most was "didn't see that coming." UBM head honcho David Levin did an interview at Paidcontent.com explaining the reasoning and you can take that as you like but Levin has a history of turning good ideas that didn't make it into better ideas that did. He was involved with Psion a few years back and was instrumental in spinning the embedded OS company Symbian out of the handheld computing pioneer, then proceeded to kick Microsoft' ass in its own back yard of OS dominance. Today, Symbian is a hard competitor with Microsoft in the portable OS market with the exception in the US where Microsoft still holds sway. In fact, one of the reasons US customers can't get one of the more nifty smart phones you see in Europe is because Microsoft is working overtime keeping them out of this mar...

Just got a blast email from Paul Miller at CMP and he has been named the CEO of CMP ... sort of. CMP as a business name is going away altogether. United Business Media decided to break up CMP into four separate business units, all lead by the leading candidates to replace Steve Weitzner. Miller will lead TechInsights, which used to be known as the CMP Electronics Group, containing EE Times, Semiconductor Insights, TechOnline, Embedded Systems Conferences and Portelligent. Tony Uphoff takes over, CMP’s Business Technology Group, now known as TechWeb, including Interop, Web 2.0, Black Hat and VoiceCon; online resources: The TechWeb Network, Light Reading, Intelligent Enterprise, InformationWeek.com, bMighty.com and The Financial Technology Network; and the market leading, award-winning InformationWeek, TechNet and MSDN Magazines. TechWeb also provides end-to-end services ranging from next-generation performance marketing, custom media, research and analyst services. Think Services wil...

Two posts caught my eye today: Stacy Higganbottham at GigaOm talking about page views versus engagement, and John Blyler on the value of Wikipedia and Digg. Stacy points out that page views, the thing most media companies use to try to sell advertising, are really pretty worthless. The real question is: are those eyeballs engaged in the content. If the audience isn't spending time digesting the content who cares how many people. John, on the other hand, throws some real doubt into the value of internet research on sites like Wikipedia and Digg because a very small, anonymous group of people are actually determining what rises to the top...not the masses themselves. I've been wondering this myself the past couple of months as readership of this blog has been growing. For the first few months I was able to recognize the regulars on the site who downloaded the posts to their blog readers, and then the people that were search for certain terms that coincided with my subject m...

Heard from Ann Mutschler at EDN and she clarified the duties of the remaining news room. Suzanne Deffree is handling distribution news and Ann also picks up stuff from Intel and AMD, but the two back each other up and cover pretty much anything that might be interesting, depending on their time limitations. Also learned in other places, that the initial reports that Reed was also selling off the exhibition business were not true. That makes more sense since I know that exhibitions make big money for Reed. What is especially interesting are the numbers Reed has reported. Reed had $231 million in operating profits on $1.76 billion in revenue, which is a better profit margin than Exxon (7 percent versus 1 percent). Revenue actually increased in 2007 by 4 percent, but all on the strength of online revenue growth. Online rose 20 percent while print dropped 2 percent.. Online revenues are 30 percent of RBI’s overall. In the US, online revenues also grew, though overall growth was flat,...

Just heard that EDA Tech Forum is moving from a quarterly supplement in EE Times to a standalone quarterly publication under the RTC Group. That's good news for the EDA World ... sort of. Paul Dempsey is continuing on as the editor-in-chief and pretty much everything else (he also is a contract editor for a UK pub) and will still write his in-depth pieces. The magazine is still heavily subsidized by Mentor Graphics (one of the only EDA companies that understands the value of advertising). So when you are looking for in-depth coverage of EDA, that's a good magazine to look at, along with Electronic Design and Chip Design. The bad news for the industry, however, is that with the loss of revenue to EE Times, that means that publication has little reason to cover EDA at all. And Paul doesn't do articles on the the latest version of the Crapfinder Verification tool, so don't ask for meetings about your latest products. He's only interested in what your customers are...

This has been a busy day. My third posting. But alot is happening. And one thing that might be very important has happened in my little community. Brian Fuller , Chris Edwards and John Blyler have all made comments about my past few blog postings, including the one with the interview of Drew Lanza, to analyze not only my facts but my appraisal of the state of the media. Now Drew made the comment that blogging doesn't provide the analysis and insight that traditional media has provided in the past, but lacks the resources to to today. But when you put three or four bloggers together to talk about a particular topic, an analysis arises. (By the way, Chris, great job on wrapping up Drew's comments). We're seeing it happen before our eyes folks.

Reading the NY Times story on the "intimated" affair between John McCain and a lobbyist has proved to me that fact-based, investigative journalism is dead, if not mortally wounded and on life support. The article begins from the perspective of the candidate's campaign 8 years ago and brings up an innuendo from articles then that there was something improper about the relationship. It fails to report that the same news organizations later reported that nothing untoward was involved. The reporters use the innuendo, supported by iinsinuations that something was wrong simply because someone might think something is wrong. When the Great Gray Lady publishes a significant story based on disproven theories, innuendo and anonymous sources you know something is definitely wrong. But it's with the Times, not the candidate. Even if it eventually turns out to be true, the times is supposed to operate by a higher standard. We're all very much concerned with the lack of a...

I got a phone call early this morning from France about Reed selling off its business pub and exhibition units but Brian Fuller beat me to the announcement. This is really big. Reed already announced they were going to layoff a couple thousand people worldwide, Mike Santarini and Maury Wright part of that. But this move says they see the writing on the wall for B2B journalism as it is traditionally done. It's as profitable as it will ever be. While this whole thing may be worth more than $2 billion, I'm not sure they are going to get that kind of price right now. Some of it could be valuable to CMP, if nothing else but to eliminate competition. But as CMP goes deeper into exhibition and webcasting, some of what Reed offers could be very valuable. I'm wondering if Advantage and NewsCorp might also get into the mix.

A few months ago, I sat down with Drew Lanza of Morgenthaler Ventures to video a short conversation about the media. An hour and a half later my tape ran out. It's taken weeks to get this down to a manageable 15 minute podcast, but what we have now works pretty well. In the interview, Drew Mentions "Ed and Brian" That would be Ed Sperling, former EiC of E News, and Brian Fuller former EiC of EE Times. When I did the interview, it was shortly after Ed Sperling was let go from EDN/E News and E News quietly went away. I finished it just 24 hours before the news come down of the latest layoffs of Mike Santarini and Maury Wright at EDN. So it has a timeliness again. Here's the video.. .

Found out an interesting bit of trivia this morning. It costs more than $1000 a line per day to run a classified ad in a Tokyo newspaper.

Mike Santarini and his boss, Maury Wright are the latest Editor Rick Nelson of Test and Measurement will be the chief editor for both T&M and EDN now, taking Maury's place and Ann Mutschler, one of the survivors of the E News massacre last fall, will add EDA as one of her many beats. That includes distribution, solar, manufacturing, and cleaning up the office every other week (just kidding). These are two really outstanding journalists, but since the industries they have covered continue to reduce advertising expenditures, it was to be expected. Mike covered EDA for the most part and EDA gives no support to the media. EE Times made this decision back in July. It was inevitable that it would happen at EDN.

There's a couple of great posts from .Rich Karlgaard at Forbes.com on the issue of the perceived "recession," and Rich Wallace at EE Times. In the middle of Karlgaard's piece is this graf: "The other really deep reason is the underlying rate of economic change. That rate is accelerating. Companies that are leaders in their industries--and this applies to leaders in all industries--are falling out of leadership faster than before. New and disruptive companies are popping up everywhere, like jaguars amid elephants. Consider what Google and Craigslist have done to strip newspapers like the L.A. Times and their readers and classified-ad revenue base. Zillow, Home and others will take the display real estate ads next." And in Wallace's, he quotes his uber boss from a conference in India: "Nowhere have ALL of these disruptive forces come to bear with more of a vengeance than in the world of electronic, Internet-driven media --a point driven home to the ...

Got an email from Rich Waters at the Financial Times, SF Bureau, saying he doesn't know about Colleen Taylor. I posted last year she had left E News for a "position at FT in SF." Never did say what she was doing because I didn't know. Rich and I finally figured it out. Colleen is a researcher for mergermarket.com, a tiny acquisition FT made a little over a year ago. So all of you PR types trying to get covered in FT by contacting Colleen... probably won't work. Remember, just because you know a journalist, doesn't mean they are going to cover your client. You have to have news that the publication might want to cover. And the latest version of the Crapfinder IP verification tool doesn't qualify. Rich, hope that keeps your email box a little cleaner.