EET Sheds EDA Expertise: Bad News for EDA Startups

Richard Wallace pens a “Note to Our Readers” in the morning edition of EE Times on-line (hyperlinks added):

Last week CMP Technology, a part of United Business Media and parent company of this newspaper, announced sweeping editorial management changes at EE Times and TechOnline, EEtimes.com‘s sister Web site. The changes will accelerate the expansion of CMP’s technology media portfolio and hasten the transformation of our staff to an online media orientation–a historic shift from traditional print-centric publishing.

David Needle in “Tech Publisher CMP Restructures” characterizes this as recognizing reality: “CMP announced a major restructuring that includes shuttering some print titles and cutting about 200 jobs, an 18 percent reduction in staff. The Manhasset, N.Y., tech publisher said the move was prompted by a decline in print revenue and growth of its online and events business.” Richard Wallace continues

The changes involve the consolidation of the EE Times and TechOnline editorial teams while strengthening both brands’ online offerings for design engineers and engineering managers.

Change and attrition are the only constants for journalists today; last week this meant saying goodbye to longtime colleagues and friends. So before the pundits and bloggers go into overdrive, we’d like to introduce our new team, acknowledge the contributions of some departing colleagues and explain what these changes signify.

As a blogger I am barely in first gear so it’s probably safe to comment. To be sure a number of other technology magazines have had their print runs curtailed if not eliminated (EE Times has less than half the page count it did from five years ago). My concerns or at least puzzlement come from two paragraphs near the end.

Topical coverage in areas such as communications, consumer electronics and industry developments in China and Japan will be augmented by freelance contributions as we also thank Richard Goering, Yoshiko Hara, Mike Clendenin, Paul O’Shea and Alex Mendelsohn for their years of service to this newspaper and TechOnline.

EDA coverage will now be the purview of the entire editorial team, with increasing focus on contributed articles. EDA application coverage is already a staple of TechOnline DesignLines, PlanetAnalog.com, PLDesignLine.com and embedded.com.

I don’t quite understand why Richard Goering wasn’t able to change orientation to online media, I have been reading his words on-line for a while now and he’s one of the better bloggers that EET has.  If EDA is everyone’s responsibility, it will be no one’s responsibility. Doubtless Goering will take a job somewhere else that involves publishing on-line, so there must be more to the story.

What are some near term strategies that startups should consider now that Goering won’t be profiling all of the little guys?

1. If you don’t have a blog on your website, you should add one now and post at least weekly. Take time to follow some of the emerging EDA oriented bloggers as they may very well become an important source of context on your firm.
2. Consider smaller regional conferences like Mentor’s EDA Tech Forum as a more important source of leads. MP Associates should consider adding magazines/print to their conference line-up (DAC, ICCAD, DVCon, …) to pick up the slack in coverage. EDA Tech Forum also publishes a quarterly journal.
3. The size of your website is measured by the number of inbound links from other quality sites. Become more active in EDA oriented on-line forums (e.g. Verification Guild, SOC Central, EDA Cafe, CADWire, Deep Chip, and Linux Electrons, all come to mind).

This shift to on-line and events is not unique to CMP: Pat McGovern, president of IDG, the parent of recently shuttered InfoWorld had the following observation in an interview in March of 2007 with Mediashift‘s Mark Glaser

McGovern: We’ve made an interesting re-definition about what business we’re in. We always thought of ourselves as [print] publishers who did websites and conferences. Now the website typically has a bigger audience than print, and it’s growing much more rapidly. We used to be a publishing company with ancillary websites and events, but now we’re a web-centric information company, and we have ancillary activities like print publications and events.