There has been a trend over the past several years in the electronics community. It has been driven by the dismal economy along with the rise of social networking. I am referring to the diminishing number of technical editors covering electronics technology.
Virtually every electronics trade journal has seen a substantial decrease in the size of their full-time editorial staff. These people are the ones, through long-term experience and a good set of contacts within the various companies and trade organizations they write about, who gave us in-depth, well balanced and well written articles on a wide range of interesting technology topics. The key term here is ‘well balanced’ – good technical editors can write without bias and cover the pluses and minuses of a cool technology, industry trend and emerging application.
Well, unfortunately, these people are fast disappearing. Taking their places are blogs and other social media venues for technology coverage – but without the constraints and guidelines of a well-run publisher. As interesting and informative as they may be, blogs are, essentially, opinion pieces. Bloggers, me included, offer opinions on various subjects and do not always present hard and fast facts or a balanced argument. This is not to say blogs are bad – good bloggers present very interesting pieces on some fascinating subjects. However, bloggers are not replacements for the traditional technical editorial staff on publications such as Chip Design, EDN, Electronics Design, EETimes and many others.
Editorial technology coverage, as we know it, is fast disappearing. To the detriment of the electronics community, it is going…going…almost gone, and that’s a real shame.
January 29th, 2010 at 10:00 am
Sadly true, Jim, in both our world of technology coverage and the world of newspapers, too. Since most of the content for the web comes from print and its associated business model (now broken), are society is in real trouble.
February 10th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
The drop in coverage has missed or been late on two important stories in the EDA field …
a) IPO by Magillem Design Services at the end of November, 2009. Given the dearth of VC funding and IPO’s for fabless semi and EDA start-ups, this was a major story happening in the midst of the Great Recession, especially as this firm rose from the ashes of Prosilog SA.
b) Virtutech purchase by Intel, owner of Wind River Systems. Didn’t appear in mainline EE media until late Monday or Tuesday, while the news moved from Twitter to blog sites like Tech Bites over the weekend. Part of a major eruption in EDA acquisitions centered on virtual platforms.