commbasics

When you hear of journalistic treasures like Nic Mokhoff, Barbara Jorgenson and Bolaji Ojo going out the door at a media house, you tend to think the worse for the company.  I know I did after hearing about the "spring cleaning" at UBM.  Closer inspection, however, shows the reasoning behind the move. UBM Electronics seems to be in a constant state of change over the past decade because the media world has been evolving rapidly over that time.  The latest obvious change is the elimination of the print version of EE Times , in favor of an all online presence.  The problem is that there have been, essentially two staffs for the online and print operations.  When the latter was shut down, that left a lot of redundancy and unnecessary cost (from an accounting perspective). EE Times and EBN have built a significant infrastructure out of contractors, including Brian Bailey, Max Maxfield and Douglas Alexander, to provide content.  They are prolific...

SCDSource, a grand experiment launched in reaction to the layoff of Richard Goering at EETimes , closed operations officially today.  The site was launched shortly after I launched New Tech Press a couple of year ago at an EDAC meeting where Paul Miller of EETimes explained why the magazine was de-emphasizing EDA coverage.  Paul took a lot of heat at that meeting, but his reasoning proved to be prophetic.  The industry was just not interested in supporting coverage in any form.  The publication was supported by some advertising and catalog revenue, but mostly by private investment from very hopeful people. New Tech Press, BTW, is still around, still producing content, but still not focused on EDA alone.

There is a common belief among the tech industries that the most important person to talk to is the engineer.   Magazines like EDN , EE Times , Electronic Design and Electronic Products are traditionally dedicated to the electronics engineer and providing "solutions" to the engineer's problems.   They are right, of course, that the engineer has to be convinced before a product can be sold, but the problem is that in today's economy, the engineer isn’t the final decision maker.   That decision rests with the CFO.   And they aren't buying anything right now because no one is telling them what they want to hear. The CFO asks only one important question and, invariably, the head of engineering answers that question wrong.   And the reason they answer the question wrong is because the vendor's marketing efforts are geared only to answer the questions the engineers ask, so the engineers are not prepared to answer the CFO correctly. Wha...

John Ford at the DFTDigest blog asked a question about the EE Times Edge , like, what is it?   He figured it out, but for the rest of you who might have missed a big change in the electronics media, the EE Times newspaper we have enjoyed for many years has gone away.  It has been replaced by the Edge, a magazine format analysis publication.  You won't find product announcements and news anywhere but online at EETimes.com and their associated DesignLine sites.  In fact, pretty much the only news you will find are your rewritten news releases. It costs less because there is less paper so TechInsights will make more profit off the publication.  The editors are not going to be taking meetings with you to discuss your product announcements and little victories because they are going to be looking at the big picture now.  You're going to have to demonstrate how you fit if you want to talk to them.  Personally, I think the 'zine is dynamite.  Especially check out Loring Wirbel...