commbasics

What a difference a few months makes. Back in September, I started promoting the concept of New Tech Press and got very polite yeah-good-luck-with-that responses. Since then several media houses followed the way of TechInsights, nee CMP, and drastically cut editorial staff, sold of properties and curtailed coverage of entire industries. Now, days away from the official launch of New Tech Press, I've been called in to meet with several companies, organizations and even European government agencies regarding the state of the media and what might be done about it. What's the difference? A new year began and the silence from the technology press scared the crap out of several industries and even several countries. As I've heard several times, no great change without pain. The potential "pain" of the loss of the media considered last year is now a reality for many technology niches. The good news is there are real industry leaders who looking at and creating new o...

In the past 24 hours I've had an chance to experience the polar extremes of marketing savvy in the technology world. On one side was the CEO of a pre-funded biotech firm looking for PR representation. On the side, was Milan Lazich, vice president of marketing for Magma Design Automation . What made this remarkable is that the biotech guy, a member a the hot new tech niche, was clueless, and Milan, representing a significant member of the brain-dead EDA industry, is a voice of sanity and reason. I was recommended to the biotech guy as an out-of-the-box communicator. He was supposed to be disappointed in the PR firms he'd already approached because, number one, they gave him "cookie-cutter" approaches to communication and, number two, they were "to expensive." So he opens up the discussion with the question, "How can you help me?" Now I could have played the game and given him the stock answers about the value of communication and ROI, etc. etc....

I ran into Alix Paultre at the Embedded Systems Conference and had a chance to catch up on what he's been doing since I reported his move from Hearst. As usual he was full of good news an optimism, which always an interesting departure from the normal doom and gloom in the publishing industry. The nice thing is he has numbers to back up his optimism. Most publications use their website to drive readers to the print publication, which has always seemed to be a bass-ackward approach. Alix has Advantage using the print publication driving readers to visit the websites and boost readership there, making the print publication a promotional tool for the web. Listen for yourself here.

The Embedded Systems Conference was an exciting place to be this week. It's been a while since I've been to a trade show where there was positive buzz from both the editorial and the vendor side. Technical content was great, there was good activity on the floor, the editors said the interviews were interesting (and I had to agree since I was wearing my New Tech Press hat this week). If you want to see some real innovation in electronics, it's going on in the embedded world. For full disclosure, I did meet some people at booths who were not happy about ESC. They didn't like their booth placement, they weren't getting any good leads and they didn't like San Jose. But most of those people were also very disagreeable. I watched a couple from a distance and saw them ignore people waiting to talk to them as they fiddled with cell phones, utter single syllable responses to questions and actually heard one of them turn away a prospect because he was "going t...

I'm at the Embedded Systems Conference this week wearing the New Tech Press hat. TechInsights has recognized this blog as legitimate media so I'm back from the dark side of media (kudos to anyone who gets the reference in this post's title.) It's an interesting and gratifying contrast to see the reception of new ideas in journalism, compared to what it was 6 months ago. Only a few, recent refugees from the B:B death spiral were willing to give thought to doing journalism different. Today I've had multiple conversations with journalists I haven't seen in months, all still employed in the traditional press, asking about opportunities in the new way of doing things. We're fielding more calls from PR reps and start-ups asking for meetings, than we've been making. It seems like a tide is turning and there are those who see the next wave starting to crest. Speaking of new ideas, New Tech Press will be publishing its first article, authored by the estimab...

Sam Whitmore's podcast announced what could be a 20 percent layoff at Ziff Davis, mostly affecting eWeek. As many as a dozen editorial personnel, including Lisa Vos and Renee Ferguson. Insight Venture Partners is apparently unhappy with the financial progress of the ever dwindling publication, now all online (remember how well that worked for Electronic News?) and decided to make sure they got rid of the deadwood. Hey, as long as there is advertising, everything is OK, right? After all, that's what people go to publications for. Advertising. Isn't it? Hello?

Chris Edwards posted something really incredible today ... a disclaimer from A PR COMPANY ON A NEWS RELEASE! What does this mean? It means that this agency hasn't read the release, has done no research, hasn't asked questions about the content of the release, doesn't even have an agreement with the client with a liability clause to protect them from lawsuits related to false statements in the release. It means they are taking money for just throwing stuff out there on the Internet. This is what corporate marketing wants? Forget about government economic policies. Forget about war. Forget about stupid lending practices. Those things didn't cause our current economic slump. The customers can't buy anything because they are too busy throwing up after reading Yahoo! News.

One of my favorite writers in the world, Jon Carroll of the SF Chronicle , wrote a contrarian view of the health of newspapers today. And one graf lower in the column highlights Loring Wirbel's comment from yesterday. "Newspapers are the original aggregators; Web sites mostly just aggregate what the newspapers have already aggregated, plus opinion. Opinion is useful, sometimes funny, sometimes incisive, but it ain't no good without data. Newspapers are the fountainhead of data. We do the necessary job - well, not me, but real journalists. And we do it because we are trained to do it. We have, dare I say it, standards." I think he makes a good point. The journalism business is changing. It's not the way it used to be, but it isn't going away anytime soon.

Over the past few months I've gone over the historical issues that created the free media in the US and now the world, the events and decisions that brought us to where we are today, and made some suggestions about how industry and media should learn to work together. In the process, I've beaten up on some specific industries, gotten involved with arguments from Big Business advocates and seen this blog grow to the point of journalistic legitimacy... whatever that means. It's been a great time. But in this final segment of the series, I want to turn specifically to my media brethren and make some suggestions about what they should do to help restore the symbiotic relationship between business and media. This morning I heard that CBS – the Tiffany Network, the organization that defined broadcast news for most of the last century – is outsourcing a large portion of its news gathering to CNN. Once again current events sets the stage for my post. There are many people that wo...

It's rough out there. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. But waiting for everything to come back the way it was is certain catastrophe. Let me remind you of the way it was as little as 10 years ago. Media was in the ascendancy with the popularity of the web, investment money flowing, Big Business doing the heavy lifting in subsidizing the market and getting the benefit of start-ups doing the R&D. Everyone was getting rich. Then Big Business believed it's own press and said: why do we need the media or even these annoying little start-ups? Some smart people started asking when was the internet actually going to make money? Not so smart people started looking for subprime loans to refinance their over valuated homes. Media companies started laying off staff as ad revenue dried up. As magazines and website media went out of business. Investors no longer had an objective, third-party view of the start-ups and stopped investing in whole segment...

We've talked for a while about the misconceptions, actions and process that has brought us to our current state of the media and it's been pretty damn depressing. But something is happening out there and I've struggled with how to transition from the doom and gloom of the previous posts to what is happening now. Amazingly enough, it happened at a meeting last night of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC). And I have to thank Georgia Marzsalek of Valley PR for insisting that I go. I've used the EDA industry as an example of bonehead marketing practices that take down an entire industry and the evidence of that was plenteous at this meeting. This is supposed to be the big meeting when the board gets elected for two year. In past meetings, this has been an SRO event with multiple CEO vying for a spot on the board. This year, EDAC was scrambling as late as 24 hours prior to the meeting to get enough CEOs to fill the 9 spots, and three of them came from c...

Less than a week after leaving his post as EiC at Reed's Semiconductor International, Pete Singer has emerged in the same position at the venerable Solid State Technology at PennWell. Hooray! We didn't lose a good tech journalist!

There were a couple of good comments yesterday that bear discussion. My "partner in crime" Peter V in the UK asked if the reader were partly to blame for the demise of media in the world, and Loring Wirbel points out that part of the problem is bean counters and greed.  We could blame readers for not being willing to pay for media, because the income from the audience has always been inconsequential. But that was, historically, the point of advertising-supported media: The common man could not afford to bear the cost of media. Up to the late 1700s, print could only be afforded by the wealthy.  In fact, even into the mid 1800s a personal library was considered a significant asset that could be borrowed against. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson bought themselves out of debt by selling off portions or all of the libraries. Advertising made it possible for common man to afford newspapers. Fast forward to today. There are lots of magazines that are delivered for fr...