commbasics

I'm starting to wonder about how long EBNonline.com is going to last.  Brian Fuller was named editor in chief in February and left in April.  I met the new guy at Design West and before I could remember to look for his card to put him in the contact list, I heard today that they've hired someone from CNET to take over.  On top of that, they've cut back their flow of paid blogger content by half, meaning a cut in freelance expenses.  I talked to a couple of them today and they are already looking for other publications to supplement the loss in revenue. In the meantime comes word that the former EiC Bolaji Ojo is launching a new publication, Electronic Purchasing Strategies, and is actively looking for sponsors for a launch in the fall.  He's joined by another EBN refugee, Barb Jorgenson. There was time that I thought the new focus on EDN and EBN spelled trouble for the EE Times brand, but it looks like the latter is much stronger.  ...

Time for my annual review of spin metric from the Design Automation Conference (DAC), this year held in Austin, Texas for the first time.  Last year I called the conference attendance as flat.  I'm calling the same for this year. This was a controversial decision and caused many companies in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry to stay home from the exhibit.  But the final news release put on a big smile and said the event "exceeded expectations."  That it did.  Most everyone I talked to said it would be a "ghost town." "deader than a doornail" and other less than happy predictions.  It was not as bad as people thought.  It was not as good as some people say. It is unfair to compare Austin's effort to San Francisco's last year.  It's better to compare it the San Diego the year previous because of the similarities in logistics.  San Diego and Austin are a lot cheaper to put o...

Girish Mhatre was at one time the Grand Poobah at EE Times (editor in chief, that is) in the publication's print heyday.  He's made some valuable comment on this blog this year regarding the trend toward content marketing and branded content .  He dropped me a note today that serves as an excellent introduction to a new series we are developing here called "Why CEO's should be scared s(p)itless about their content.  I offer Girish's observations without comment... for now. ;)   Girish Mhatre, journalist and wine enthusiast Hi Lou, prompted by a conversation with you, I’ve conducted an informal survey of company content strategies. Here are some observations: I must say that I don’t get it. If this is the state of the art in content marketing by tech companies, then it’s not very effective -- with one exception.  Cadence: I am hugely unimpressed. Perhaps Fuller hasn’t got his arms around a strategy yet ( Note: Girish is right. Met wi...

Following up on yesterday's post on manipulating the press, this article shows how easy it was for Edward Snowden to move the press in ways beneficial to him... and he isn't a big corporation. Just one guy.

I've been a journalist for several decades now and for most of that time, I've bought into that myth... but since the advent of social media, my belief in that myth has eroded into virtual non-existance. I worked very hard on maintaining objectivity in everything I did in the early years and discovered something uncomfortable. The closer any journalist approached a story with real objectivity, the less likely that journalist would have a career. The more they were able to artfully inject their opinion into a piece, the faster their career rose. Interesting story on CNN today on how the "objective" press is manipulated by people with a particular axe to grind. The story reveals how whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, have sought out journalists that have a reputation for dislking certain political extremes for the purpose of gaining public sympathy for their actions.  For Snowden, his use of The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald have paid off handsomely with offer...

Many companies tell us wondrous numbers about how many hits they get on their site, all produced by their amazing SEO program.  But when I ask how many of those hits are real people and how many are spiderbots and how many are RSS reads, they have no idea what I'm talking about.  All they know is their site gets a lot of traffic.  That is not necessarily a good thing There is a minor skirmish in the media metric world over search engine optimization (SEO) , mostly between SEO and content marketing experts (I generally fall in the latter area). Yesterday I found a story in the obviously slanted Content Marketing Institute that actually explained where the lack is . When you need to sell a bunch of products to a bunch of people.  SEO is your number one web tool.  You need to reach a lot of people and making it easier for them to find you on the web is a great idea.  But if your business is selling a few products and services to a small number of c...

Alex Wolfe, who left UBM Tech a few weeks after Design West in San Jose, has taken a position as director of strategic communications at Oracle.  Most bets were on him moving to Intel, but I wasn't really sure that would have been the greatest move for either Wolfe of Intel.  The chip company already has several journalistic enterprises underway. There's no word on the details of his new position but I think we'll see Oracle jumping into the corporate journalism world with Alex leading the charg. This as a very positive move for Oracle and a good one for Alex.  He seems to think it's "not so dark" being on the corporate side, according to his comments on his Linkedin page. Wonder what SAP is thinking? Related articles The final word on UBM... for now Alex Wolfe is next to leave UBM

Wow.  I've been getting an earful for several weeks about the changes in B2B media,especially in the embedded, semi and electronics industry.  One might think it's Armegeddon. One PR maven just came out and said that the efforts of companies like Cadence, Intel and Altera to produced independent content is a smoke screen and that they are "clearly" not objective.  And yet when I've heard the same thing from others, no one can produce any CLEAR evidence that the content is anything but objective... at least as objective as a human being can be. Like climate change, humans have had a significant hand in creating the current environment and, like climate change scientists, there are those who say it needs to be reversed and those (like me) who say we need to adapt.  Why do I take that position?  Because no one knows how to reverse it. Let me be very clear, here: unless advertisers decide to quadruple their ad buys, like, tomorrow, noth...