Salon, The Daily Beast and the medium of ideas
Salon.com is the latest online magazine to gasp for air like handcuffed Jack in one of the last scenes of “Titanic.” It’s a fine publication that’s been bleeding red for years, and The Wall Street Journal reports today that it’s looking for some oxygen or Rose with a hacksaw. Whatever. It’s the latest in a [...]
What’s up with EE Times and EDN?
Now that the merger between UBM and Canon Communications is final, we can start to field the questions about what’s up at EE Times and EDN, the latter of which was acquired by Canon earlier this year. Since the deal was first announced, there was some hand-wringing that suggested that the EE Times Group (now [...]
Social media and engineers: Waste of time?
Props to EDAC’s Emerging Companies Committee for hosting a panel last week on social media. It’s clearly still in its infancy in the electronics B:B space, and the audience is unique (engineers are among the smartest folks in the room but not the most social). The presentation is worth your time, with a range of [...]
We don’t know squat
We have soaring expectations that web metrics are finally the way we’re going to measure reader/user behavior and therefore editorial and advertising value, and it turns out not so. A Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism study suggests it’s almost no better that old-school print metrics (Audit Bureau of Circulation etc.). Metrics tracking varies widely, [...]
Up and to the right
Remember this chart? My new/old boss, Paul Miller does. He humorously called this post out in a recent management meeting. After it first posted, he made a good point that I had not given enough context about Compete.com and was unfairly representing EE Times traffic. Point taken and corrected. Compete metrics come from people who [...]
Does the media have any value any more?
That was the question that Sam Whitmore essentially posited in an interview we did recently. He has clients who ask him the question. In short: In an era in which direct-to-customer communications and social media dominates, who needs the media, especially the trade press? My answer, for one, is the vendors themselves. I’ve written a [...]
The sound of change
You can kind of hear it in the wind, the sound of change in publishing. The cacophonous clanking of consolidation continues to be sure, but if you listen closely enough there’s music in the distance. Howard Kurtz points at, what I think is, one of the drivers of change in his post earlier this week [...]
No big deal: Magazine circulation falls (again)
The sky isn’t falling, really, even though the Audit Bureau of Circulation reports that overall subscriptions for magazines are down 2.27 percent. Some big titles took it on the chin, to be sure: Playboy (-34%), Reader’s Digest (-25%). Neither of those tumbles is a head-scratcher. But overall, circulation (paid and verified) is 313 million. That’s [...]
It’s the medium is the message, stupid
L. Gordon Crovitz, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required), puts it simply: “It’s ideas that count, not how they’re transmitted.” This is a closing line in a column about e-books and the iPad. That a “print” journalist makes this comment directly and without pussy-footing around with adverbs is a testament to how far [...]
Chatting with Karen and Rick on Synopsys’ Conversation Central
Just after jumping back into the fray at EE Times last week, I had a chance to talk about what we’re doing and the state of the “social engineer” with two of our industry’s leading communicators and social media mavens: Karen Bartleson and Rick Jamison at Synopsys. Their Conversation Central programming has expanded from its [...]
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