It gets worse

Besides Loring Wirbel, Rich Wallace has also been let go at EE Times.


More details will follow but it seems Techinsights is on the retreat from their traditional business.  Officially, the editorial staff at EE Times is intact.  Rich and Loring were not considered editorial staff.  Rich was essentially tasked with coordinating all the various content vehicles that Techinsights has acquired.  Loring took the job, originally offered to Brian Fuller, of managing the EE Times Market intelligence division.  Seems like a bad choice on Loring's part in hindsight.

Techinsights as a company has had great success with their events (Embedded Systems Conference being the big dog) and Semiconductor Insights, acquired last year, provides the analysis division making Loring redundant.  Loring is a great journalist and will either be picked up by some other publication or can make a pretty good living as a freelancer.

The tough decision had to be Rich Wallace.  Techinsights has acquired a lot of content providers over the past few years, including TechOnline.  But the material all the different components puts out is not well integrated.  The EE Times search engine is not comprehensive.  Rich had the job of putting all that together and he got that job just a few months ago.  It obviously isn't done.

There were more layoffs but the extent won't be announced until Friday.  They included advertising, events and support staff.  It makes sense from a business perspective.  If companies aren't advertising then why do you need advertising staff.  And no advertising cuts into the content production and, I guess, the integration of that content.

But it's not just Techinsights going through this process.  PC magazine announced just an hour ago that they were going 100 percent digital and closing down the monthly print publication.  We can probably expect layoff announcements from them in editorial in the next few months.

It's time we all started rethinking how journalism is done, especially in the technology B2B world.

Comments

  1. Tim MoranNovember 19, 2008 at 4:42 AM

    Lou:

    I think you're pretty much right. The days of EET being THE news source for the industry are gone. And I know techinsights is not alone, but I was there, and there was an opportunity to bring it all together and, well, they just didn't go for it. It would have meant investment and, then, hopefully, growth, and there was no way. Embedded seems to be the "big dog" right now, but we all know how cyclical that is. NCC, Comdex, etc. etc. And one of the comments at the last Embedded Con was that there won't be a need for an Embedded show at some point because ALL computing will be embedded. It should continue to be interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Loring WirbelNovember 19, 2008 at 7:42 AM

    Hard to call my decision "wrong," since if I had to do it all over again, I'd give it a try. There were opportunities out there that couldn't be leveraged because there was no sales and marketing support. And this was key in trying to grow new revenue streams, as Tim mentioned. You have to invest new money and dedicate marketing people to pushing the new stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lou CoveyNovember 19, 2008 at 8:42 AM

    What? You have to INVEST in marketing? Sounds like heresy to me. I always thought marketing just oozes out of the product and into the brains of the customer.

    ReplyDelete

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