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.  ...

Continuing on with our discussion about good content, I've come across some fascinating data regarding how customers in the world of semiconductor design are consuming it and what it means for social media.  Let's start with a poll taken by a company I've been consulting to in recent weeks. The company wanted to get some attention from a select segment of customers.  The company estimates that their entire customer base consists of a few thousand people worldwide and they only need to reach a small part of that to be successful.  So they were looking into ways to best reach them.  Good content was a given in their estimation, but how to create that content and how to deliver it most efficiently was the question.  They had an assumption on what would be the best path that I questioned so I asked them to do something: talk to your current and potential customer about where they get their information. I've asked my clients to do this for many y...

I was listening to an NPR program last weekend about the success of sharing sites, like Buzzfeed .  It opened up with the statement that "it used to be the key to success online was success in search..."  Going forward the program succinctly laid out how important of search in modern internet communications strategies. Not very. The program went on to talk about how sharing, or even "borrowing" content is the new key to success... even if it wasn't quite honest.  Point taken.  However, the discussion brought to mind something I've said over and over (and that seems to be making progress in the minds of some) that real, honest, sharable content is what will bring people to your website and do business with you. Page rankings are important to companies that are selling iPhone aftermarket accessories and boner pills.  They are also important to large corporations who want to make sure that no one sees links to the lower tier competi...

It's like the good old days in B2B press with personnel leap-frogging from one  pub to another.   Patrick Mannion six months ago jumped from his post of editorial director of TechOnline at United Business Media to go take the newly created post of director of content at Hearst Electronics Group.Well, UBM thought that was a pretty neat idea and created a similar post for EDN and the Designlines.  Who would best fill that post then.... wait for it.... Patrick Mannion? That opens a whole in the staff over at Hearst that's being filled temporarily by Murray Slovick on a consulting basis, while they look for a permanent replacement. Director of content is a fairly new concept developed to handle the flood of information on the internet.  Where an editorial director sets policy direction for the editorial staff, the content produced by that staff is also under the supervision of the content director, whose job it is to coordinate and weave together that cont...

News came in this morning that UBM is acquiring Canon Communications  for $287 million.  That means EDN will become part of the EE Times Group, once the sale is approved by US regulators. It was just last February that Canon bought EDN , Test and Measurement World, Design News and Packaging Digest off the struggling Reed Business operation, followed by an ill-advised layoff of Robert Cravotta, picking up Rich Nass from Embedded Systems and the defection of Ron Wilson back to EE Times .  At that point I was concerned about the future of EDN and T&M World because it was obvious from discussions within Canon that they really didn't understand what EDN was all about, even though they were a successful and profitable publishing company. With this acquisition one might assume that EDN is not long for this world as they were an active competitor to EE Times, but a call with Paul Miller, CEO of the EE Times Group, this morning allayed that concern.  Miller sees t...

The news popped up yesterday while I was buried in meetings that Ron Wilson has rejoined EE Times from EDN and Rich Nass has moved over to Canon to work on the medical publications.  Ron is taking Rich's place.  That's kind of exciting to me.  Just like old times with editors bouncing between publications rather than getting laid off and disappearing into corporate black holes.  I think it's a good move for EE Times, Canon and the two journalists.  Rich has been leading the charge for new media at UBM for a while and Canon can sure use his experience to get into the 21st century.  And Ron's talents can best be used by the program Paul Miller is setting up over at the EE Times Group.   Back in about 2005 I was attending a conference in Anaheim and was walking through the lobby of my hotel when I saw Ron Wilson, then of EE Times, and Maury Wright, recently installed as EiC of EDN hunkered down at a restaurant table and looked like ...

While at DAC last week I had a few interviews scheduled for the live Vpype broadcasts (sponsored by Vpype and Magma Design Automation ) that never got off the ground due to bandwidth issues.  One of them was with Robert Cravotta, former embedded and microprocessor editor for EDN and now the chief analyst for Embedded Insights .  Luckily, I brought my Zi6 with me. Robert and I have been talking off and on for the past couple of months since his layoff about the uses of social media and he's taken technical journalism to another level in his new endeavor.  He was in charge of EDN's very popular Microprocessor Directory... that has disappeared under the new ownership.  In Robert's head, however, was the seed of an idea that would make the directory more valuable to the engineering community but never had the opportunity to implement under Reed Business Media.  Embedded Insights is, in essence, the culmination of that idea.  But I'll le...

We recently put out a New Tech Press article that is starting to filter through our network, but something interesting has happened in the process.  Some people are complaining that something got left out. Here's an analogy.  There was a TV show a while back where everyone used Mac computers.  That was because Apple had paid for that visibility.  Sales started to rise for Macs.  At one point, Apple decided not to pay.  Little round stickers showed up on the computers, covering the Apple logo.  Sales started to drop.  Apple recanted and paid the sponsorship and the stickers came off and sales went up. That's kind of what New Tech Press is all about.  We want to put out good information.  That process of developing the information costs something and has to be paid for.  That's what the sponsors do.  In the case of this particular article, we had a lot of companies excited about doing this article.  ...

Along with the furor over Cadence senior exec turnover, tiny little LogicVision also announced a shakeup.  They dropped their CFO, VP of marketing and VP of operations and replaced them with new beancounters and engineers. LogicVision has been struggling in the market for almost a decade, primarily because their competition has made a greater investment in marketing than they have.  LogicVision actually has a superior product and one that is uniquely suited to large, complex semiconductor design.  The competition has been squeezing out as much value of old technology as possible, but gets their message out much more effectively than LogicVision ever has. And every year, LogicVision decides to reduce their effort to communicate with the market, fight holding actions on their remaining market share, and ... replace marketing expertise with engineering. Can't be done, folks.  The best technology ALWAYS loses to superior marketing,

The big news to day is that Ann Mutschler is leaving EDN after 7 total years (She came to work with me after two years, bounced around the PR trade and then went back five years ago).  That's bad news for the electronics industry who is losing yet another experienced, credible third-party voice.  It's bad news for EDN, too.  Ann has been a prodigious writer for the Reed publications.   She was brought in by Ed Sperling and survived several rounds of layoffs (including Mike Santarini, Sperling, and Maury Wright) before deciding that she could make it on her own as a freelancer.   She has several contracts lined up and I have her targeted for work with New Tech Press. I'm using this as a lead in the part three on the "profession" of journalism because it proves my point in a timely manner.   In the last entry, I made the claim that journalism really doesn't meet the criteria for being called a profession; that it might be more ...

New Tech Press Biz Dev home boy, Ozzie Wallace has started a Facebook Group called "Marketing like it is1999 " and we're opening it to everyone.  If you haven't tried Facebook, or signed up and can't figure out what the big deal is, this might give you a reason. This blog, along with several others, has been maintaining the conversation about the changing state of the media and how it affects business.  It's time to bring it all together and this is where we're proposing to do it. You have to be a Facebook member, but it took Ann Mutschler at Reed did it in less than a minute.  It's time to get it, folks.