Gary Smith EDA » The State of the Electronics’ Media: The Glorious Past, the Confused Present and Hopeful Future

JUL

2013

The State of the Electronics’ Media: The Glorious Past, the Confused Present and Hopeful Future

by Gary Smith EDA

Altera, Atmel, Cadence, DAC, EDA, Xilinx

I had lunch with Sean Murphy this week. For those who don’t know Sean, he is one of the few vision guys in EDA. He always gets me thinking, which is hard during the dog-days of summer. Sean isn’t active in EDA presently; he is using his talents to help a very confused Medical market as there are not many chances to help the EDA industry right now (and get paid for it). So we spent lunch bemoaning the sorry state of the Electronics industry and trying to solve the world’s problems over a great Chinese lunch at the 4-5-6 restaurant.

Actually the electronic industry isn’t in that bad of a shape; it is morphing into something new. Once I decided to write an article about that I stated to think about how to publish it to the widest audience. That brought me face-to-face with the state of the present electronics media. It actually is getting better. The “New Web-based Media”, which raised its ugly head at the turn of the century, has finally been proven to be bogus and a dedicated group of editors and bloggers are doing their best to revive the efficiencies of the past. And (sorry folks) it is the analyst and editors that are important, not the BRAND! And yes, it is far more efficient to go into an office every day and stand around the water cooler or coffee pot and create that critical mass that innovation requires. I have yet to get all of that talent to go to a Starbucks at the same time for a brainstorming session. The problem that persists is how this rag-tag group of heroes gets paid.

Right now these heroes, (Richard Goering, Michael Santarini, Ron Wilson, Paul Dempsey, John Cooley, Peggy Aycinena, Peter Clark, Brian Fuller, Brian Bailey, Ann Steffora Mutschler, Daniel Nenni, Clyde Maxfield, Ed Sperling, John Blyer, Dylan McGrath, Sol Gradman, Kevin Morris, Brian Moyer, Jim Turley, John Donovan, Paul McLennan, David Maliniak, Rick Merritt and many more) are doing their best to carry the flag. Technical Analysts are in the same state. I’m lucky; I went back to the old Dataquest business model, which still works, and being old I now get social security, plus I have a great wife that gives me medical benefits, still I can’t afford to take nearly as many trips, nor can I do the user surveys needed to do the full work I was doing at Gartner and still get Casey through college. But then neither can a Gartner analyst. You get what you pay for.

So today we are either getting by with about 60% of what we had in the past by using Company-sponsored media, and my hat’s off to the Cadence, Xilinx, Altera, Atmel, and Teledyne LeCroy’s of the world that fund that approach, they are doing their best, or we are using “coin-operated” analysis and media. Or we are just cutting back on our services to keep our price points affordable.

So there you have it. Since I am neither a blogger nor an editor, I guess I’ll just sit back and wait to see how this works out.

About the Author

18 Comments

Mike Santarini September 6, 2013 at 4:45 pm

I'll score it a win that I didn't even have to ask to be put on the list...Tree falls in the forest and all that...
Pingback: What's EE Times' Future Now? (And What's Ours?) - |
Meenu Sarin August 5, 2013 at 8:43 pm

Gary, thanks for initiating this interesting conversation. I agree with the statements above that company sponsored media has made it tough for the readers to discern what content is trustworthy. In fact I’d go ahead and say that it is increasingly tough for one to wear two different hats – pay for play blog/review/analysis or the independent reviewer one. It is a digital world there with credibility taking a beating if one were to straddle across the two – and hence (in my opinion), the subscription based biz model is most likely an interim one till someone figures out one how to get the money in through either an independent 3rd party or through the companies but in a unbiased mode. That then would be termed as another piece of the semicon eco-system. Company social media is making great contributions to the discussions and education. I especially liked Qualcomm’s Brew site (an application development platform created originally for CDMA mobile phones featuring third-party applications). It had a lot of discussions and facilitated the company to get application developers to port their applications among all BREW devices.
- GARY Smith August 6, 2013 at 9:27 am
  
  Thanks Meenu, I like your idea about the interim solution. I’ll try to keep this going. There has to be an answer somewhere. We will damage the semiconductor ecosystem if we don’t.//////////////////////////////// Thanks for the tip. I’ll check out the BREW site.///////////////////////// Gary
Daniel Nenni August 1, 2013 at 11:27 am

Hi Gary, Good conversation, thank you. I think the term New Media best applies to SemiWIki. We are consultants, not editors or analysts. By day we work with emerging technology companies on strategic: business development, sales, and marketing activities. We write write white papers, help with messaging, do webinars, and speak at events. More than 600,000 people have read SemiWiki since we opened in 2011. I just hope New Media continues to get traction. The fabless semiconductor ecosystem really needs an open communications channel like SemiWiki. Cheers, D.A.N.
Gary Smith July 31, 2013 at 2:31 pm

Thanks Dan. I think you guys are doing a great job considering the situation. What I am fighting is the situation you guys are forced to survive in. As I said I am not an editor nor a blogger, I am an analyst. In general my audience knows that I am on the side of my clients’ customers, not my clients. I sell data and give my opinion based on that data. If a client asks me to write a report I try my best to label their input as theirs and mine as mine, but I do validate that their data is good data and don’t write reports on skewed data. As far as representing clients and non-clients (who often compete,) it is well known that I will publicly (and privately) challenge my clients if they are wrong (in my humble opinion). I of course give then the opportunity to change my mind but if they don’t I feel free to oppose their position. Interestingly one of the ways to get a promotion at Dataquest was to have a client tell Dataquest to fire an analyst. That isn’t happening today. I still believe that the readers trust the analyst, or editor, and not specifically the Brand. A Company can help, as long as their Brand is trusted, but still the analyst or editor must make his own reputation as a trusted source. The readership expects the Company to fire employee who threatens their Brand’s reputation.
- David Maliniak August 5, 2013 at 7:46 am
  
  Hey Gary: You forgot me but that's OK given that I'm no longer an active member of the EOEM B2B media. I am, however, alive and very well in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy. Somewhere up above you said: I still believe that the readers trust the analyst, or editor, and not specifically the Brand. A Company can help, as long as their Brand is trusted, but still the analyst or editor must make his own reputation as a trusted source. The readership expects the Company to fire employee who threatens their Brand’s reputation. What you wrote is very true. However, the game changes when the editor is put in the position of having to write "sponsored editorial" (or "advertorial") content -- under his or her own byline. This began happening at my old haunt many years ago despite the editors' loud protests. Now, as you also commented earlier, it becomes even more difficult for the average reader to discern what content is trustworthy. Sponsored content spread like wildfire into not only print but podcasts, videos, etc. Advertisers loved it (well, for a time, anyway) because they could now control the messaging. Sure, editors were told that they could include other viewpoints in these pieces, but the reality was that the content was subject to sponsor review. At the end of the day, they had final say and their dollars backed that up. It was quite a quandary for those of us who had spent 20 or more years building our reputations as trustworthy and unbiased reporters. When the opportunity to move to the corporate marketing side arose a little over a year ago, I didn't hesitate. I sleep a lot better now.
  - Gary Smith August 5, 2013 at 10:32 am
    
    Dave,...................................... Good to hear where you landed. Does this mean you get to spend your daughter's birthday with her rather than at DAC;-> And one more time I'll update my note with your name and Teledyne LeCroy................................................. I didn’t know that the print press had received so much pressure from the Companies. It sounds like when the Web came into the picture they thought that they had another viable choice than print media. Seems like they shot themselves in the foot. Now we are trying to find out how we can fund some “trusted source media”. I wonder if the Companies are going to figure out that while they've generated some great Company content, by not funding advertising of the Brands they have lost the independent/ trusted resources of the past that they relied on............................... Gary
John Donovan July 31, 2013 at 2:26 pm

It's a tough row to hoe for independent tech journalists, but we just keep truckin' with modest advertising and/or sponsorship dollars. It's hard to hit a readership inflection point without being part of a large publishing outfit, which is where a few editors still work (on 1099s? the wave of the future). Still, if you work from home or Starbucks there isn't much overhead to cover. Most of the editors I know make most of their money tech writing for vendors (including yours truly); others have gone to work for the vendors themselves. Hats off to Xilinx, Altera, and Cadence for hiring some of the best editors in the industry; they've been given a lot of editorial license, but they now have parameters within which to work that they didn't have before. Rich and Ron are turning out very high quality work, though Ron in particular could use a lot wider audience than he's getting. As for Brian, I'm keen to see what Cadence has in mind for him! :-)
- Gary Smith August 2, 2013 at 5:04 pm
  
  John,////// "The Wall is Gone"/////// The wall between editor and advertising used to be a barricade. Mike Santarini tells a funny story about one day when a sales person walked into the journalist area. The sales rep was loudly told to leave and never come back.///// What I feel for you guys now is that you are having to do both the editorial and the sales to make a living. It takes time and energy that takes away from the time to do just the editorial. The 'Brands' used to be there for you to do that.////// Now it's not the 'Brands' fault. The Corporate advertising sponsors went away and starting moving those dollars into their own Company sponsored media. The Brands weren't making the same money and needed to make changes. Now the positive is that we have a new breed of technical Company Bloggers that we didn't see in the old days who are making some great contributions to the discussion and education. Jem Davies from ARM and Jason Andrews from Cadence are two of my favorites. Now I'm only listing 2 of my favorites (of the many that there are) because my inadvertently leaving editors names off has hurt feelings of my friends who just failed to remember that sometimes I forgot.) I agree Brian seems to be in the best position to work this corporate sponsored media thing out./////// John, you rightly (and your peers as well), on occasion write for clients. What's lost for me as a engineer is that I don't always know when it's commissioned work or just your editorial. I’m just wondering how we get back to independent/ trusted content.//////// Gary
Brian Fuller July 31, 2013 at 1:25 pm

Gary, I think you've hit the nail on the head, although I would have used a word other "confused" for the present state of affairs. I think it's a "complex" or "evolving" present that's far from settled but it's completely natural in the evolution of electronics publishing. UBM scooped up every valuable title it could and now finds its corporate footprint is way too big to afford to play in an evolving market. And it spent too much time thinking about what to do with those traditional titles while technology was rolling ahead. At the same time, UBM etc. took a major hit 10 years ago when corporations yanked a lot of their spend and refunnelled it into their own websites, which were pretty weak at the time. That worked well for them. Now when you think they could push some of those chips back onto the publishing table, there's no one to write about the industry. So they're pulling the money back in and spending it on new content creation and content marketing people and strategies. Meanwhile, the great sites you've mentioned and Kevin and others are offering exactly what they should be offering at this moment in time: smart, targeted and cost-effective solutions for advertising and contributed articles. Give it a few years and you'll see some consolidation as some of these guys merge, but for now it's an evolving present and it's surely a hopeful future.
- Gary Smith August 2, 2013 at 4:41 pm
  
  Brian, I agree that it's complex but what will the future look like? I miss the user surveys that used to be done at Gartner where we had the opportunity to compare the tools from the users' reviews. I miss the independent reviews by editors of new tools that come out. Much of the missing content has been replaced by the company-sponsored media where they highlight new features and applications for new products. Much of it is quite good. I miss the independent, non-commissioned analysis by editors that was a feature of the old media that's not as frequently written now. Gary
Daniel Payne July 31, 2013 at 9:02 am

Gary, at SemiWiki we have multiple bloggers besides Daniel Nenni, like: Paul McLellan, Eric Esteve, Daniel Payne. At DAC I wrote 27 trip reports and 20 of those reports were about EDA or Semi IP companies that are not SemiWiki subscribers, just to let the folks here know that we blog often about many companies in our industry not just subscribers.
Kevin Morris July 30, 2013 at 2:49 pm

Maybe because we don't wear matching golf shirts and hats to DAC like Nenni's guys? :)
- Gary Smith July 30, 2013 at 6:45 pm
  
  Oh, very nice;-> That doesn't help with why I missed John Donovan, but the beauty of the web is that it erases some mistakes.
GARY Smith July 30, 2013 at 11:05 am

Damn, how did I miss you guys.
Kevin Morris July 30, 2013 at 9:30 am

Hi Gary, Here at EEJournal.com we have been running for ten years, have a global audience of over 230,000 readers, have a dedicated EDA channel, a regular EDA newsletter, and a thriving social media presence. We do real objective journalism with real, experienced editors (not pay-for-play). We cover all of the EDA industry (not just the companies who sponsor us), and we manage to pay our editors and still make a profit. There is an important distinction between objective journalism and most of what you mention above - former journalists doing marketing, pay-for-play blogs, and corporate communications groups. As independent journalists, we serve the audience. If company A comes out with a bad product or we need to take a skeptical view of an announcement, we do so. People whose salary has been paid by company A, or who have been specifically contracted to write favorably about company A will not do that. Marketing and journalism are both important sources of information for the industry, but they are not interchangeable. Our EE Journal editors - Bryon Moyer, Jim Turley, Dick Selwood, Amelia Dalton, and I - are chartered to serve the audience with critical and analytical insight - without regard to sponsorship interests. This is the traditional model for journalism served up electronically. Nothing about the transition from paper distribution to electronic media has altered the viability of that model for the trade press. - There just aren't as many of us doing it successfully anymore. Kevin Morris EEJournal.com
Dick Selwood July 30, 2013 at 8:25 am

Hi Gary In a naked piece of self-promotion, please add Kevin Morris, Brian Moyer and Jim Turley to your list of heros. At EEJournal we do journalism the old-fashioned way - we write about thjngs we think are important and interesting and try to be as objective as we can, bringing more years experience than we would care to think about to our input. And in Europe there are still those old-fashioned ink on paper magazines in UK, France, Germany, Italy... Cheers Dick