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Posts Tagged ‘Brian Fuller’

What is the EDA Editorial Brain Trust Today?

Monday, August 25th, 2014

 

The EDA editorial brain trust today is the topic of our continuing conversation with Richard Goering and Brian Fuller.  

 

Brian Fuller

Brian Fuller

Richard Goering

Richard Goering

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ED:  What is the EDA editorial brain trust these days?

RICHARD: Not sure how you’re defining “brain trust,” but if there is one, it’s with the vendors and the independent on-line publications.

ED:  Who makes up the EDA editorial brain trust?

RICHARD:  If you add it all up, there are still a number of editors with deep EDA and semiconductor experience – they’re just no longer with print publications.

Additionally, there are now a number of writers and bloggers who didn’t start as journalists but who turned in that direction during the transition away from print.

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The Golden Age of EDA Editorial

Sunday, August 17th, 2014

 

There once was a golden age for EDA editorial.   Seems funny to say nowadays, when we see EDA editorial in a virtual shambles…where one or two publications gamely soldier on as pure play editorial ventures…while others have adopted various sponsorship business models, thereby incurring the snide, not-accurate accusation of being pay-for-play vehicles.

Among the handful of first-tier publications back around the turn of the century, EE Times clearly was the go-to book for EDA.   Staffed by a corps of editors who brought their sharp, keen-edged industry knowledge to their reporting, no EDA startup thought they launched themselves successfully without being covered in EE Times.   And the formula worked for quite a while.  I still remember how those 240 page tomes came to the mailbox each week.

There were two people who figured prominently in the EE Times braintrust.

Brian Fuller, as editor-in-chief, oversaw and created much of what was successful for the various sections that covered all of electronic design.   And there was Richard Goering, the longtime EDA editor with his imposing manner, startling industry knowledge and contacts.   Richard was perhaps best known for refusing to allow canned presentations during interviews.  He’d ask for material before the interview, then start off the interview with those famous words, “I’ve looked over your material and have a few questions,” and run the 30 -45 minute interview.  It was a little like Steve Jobs saying, “Oh, and one more thing.”

EDA editorial has changed, needless to say.  Fortunately, we have Fuller and Goering here to talk a little about what EDA editorial used to be, what it is today, and what we can look toward in the future.   We’ll post their thoughts over the next several weeks, usually on a Monday.

I can’t think of any individuals more qualified to speak cogently on this subject.

 

Brian Fuller

Brian Fuller

Richard Goering

Richard Goering

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ED:   Brian, Richard, thanks for taking time to reminisce a little and to analyze and speculate about where we’re at now.  So let me kick it off with this question:

What’s happened to electronic design editorial and where is it today?

BRIAN:  Ed, to your question what’s happened to electronic design editorial is pretty simple: it’s still there…it’s just in a different place.

ED:   I keep referring to a golden age for EDA editorial.  There was one, wasn’t there?

BRIAN:  Yes, there was!  Think back 20 years ago and you had at least three major publications with EDA editors of one type or another: EDN, Electronic Design, EE Times, Electronic News (not to mention overseas publications).

ED:  There also was Computer Design, the first publication covering EDA to bite the dust.

BRIAN:    That’s right!

ED:  But I interrupted you…

BRIAN:  EE Times, of which I am most familiar, had 2.5 editors at one point covering the design automation industry from the technology and business standpoint.

ED:  So what happened?

BRIAN:  Well, we all know the backstory since then: In 2001, the dot-com bubble burst. Semiconductor and EDA companies shifted marketing dollars to their own site development and to those publications they thought could deliver more eyeballs.

ED:   What about the notion that EDA vendors never bought sufficient advertising and therefore killed their own editorial?

BRIAN: It wasn’t just with EDA, but I think EDA started the ball rolling, and they were big advertisers so the impact was significant.   Electronics publications had to prioritize areas that they were going to cover. Paul Miller, then CEO of UBM Electronics, said pretty bluntly “EDA marketers: If you’re not going to support us, we can’t invest in editors.”

That was the end of Mike Santarini at EE Times; just a few years later it was the end of Richard Goering, now my colleague at Cadence.

RICHARD: Well, not really the “end” of Mike or myself; Mike went to Xilinx, and I’m now at Cadence. But I do agree with Brian that a lack of advertising revenues ended my career at EE Times.

ED:  So what do we have today?

RICHARD:  Not much is left in print.  EE Times, EDN and Electronic Design still exist on-line, but in more of a blog format than traditional journalism. Their EDA coverage is limited.

BRIAN:  Richard’s right. There isn’t an EDA “press corps” in the old definition of the term. The electronics publishing industry has restructured itself into smaller, more specialized sites with much lower overhead than the traditional electronics publishing houses, and they are quite healthy. Editors do cover EDA from various angles, but they also cover lithography and foundry and SoC design and so on.

These are outfits like SemiWiki, EE Journal and its sister publications, Semiconductor Engineering, Chip Design Magazineand so on.

Over this same period, those companies that shifted their marketing dollars away from third-party publishers to build out their own sites, realized they needed content experts, because that¹s never been their strength. So, as more editors have been turned out onto the streets from third-party publishing, industry companies have eagerly snapped them up to build content.

Right now, we have a very interesting mixture of editors working together from two sides of the aisle, if you will, to create technology conversations.

……………………..

 

So what is the EDA editorial braintrust these days?  See what Richard and Brian have to say about it in our next blog. 

 

 

 

 

HOW will EDA/IP get beyond the horizon?

Sunday, March 16th, 2014

Brian Fuller -­ editor in chief of the now-lamented EE Times during its best years ­- and I were talking about it being great that there are these predictions about where EDA/IP is going in 2014. Chris Rowen’s wrap up prediction talked about EDA’s need to move beyond component – level focus. Chris isn’t alone in this idea.

The question is:  HOW will EDA/IP get beyond the component level and start looking at what’s beyond the 25-year EDA horizon and how EDA can and must add value.

Brian and I would love to hear what readers out there think…..

Does EDA & IP need to go beyond?

Where does it need to go?

And how will it get there?

So why comment on blogs?

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, a client asked, in essence, “why comment on articles or blogs?”

OK, so he didn’t say it exactly like that. But he did say that he’s

…struggling to figure out what really makes sense regarding the growing amount of posting by anybody and everybody….Is all this writing and blogging serving a real purpose? I’m not sure. Some blogs get recognition and response….I think most don’t.

He’s got a point. I think bloggers (indie, company and editorial) all feel, in our gut, that there’s value. But how do we measure that value? What do comments add to a blog or article? Tough one.

So I asked some of the bloggers what they thought. First off, I went to one of the longest running bloggers in EDA – Karen Bartleson. (Is it really three years, Karen? She’s at http://www.synopsys.com/blogs/thestandardsgame). She shed really insightful light on why EDA blogs get so few comments, if we compare them to consumer blogs like Yelp. And, she has her blog up on what she’s seen in the three years since she started her blog. So do take a look at Karen’s analysis of EDA blogging. I bet she’s got a take on the state of EDA blog comments.

Karen’s, along with a bunch of other bloggers’ comments on EDA blog comments gave me some trends to ponder. Some recurring points:

__the honeymoon infatuation period for EDA blogging has come…and is going. Now there needs to be some sense of longterm value.

My take…just what is “value” in terms of EDA blogs? Different from perspectives of the client, journalist and PR person.

__some indie bloggers say they see their blogs as diaries, written for themselves and interested people.

My take…everyone is aware of a larger cast of potential viewers, however. (By and large, they value comments but don’t use it as a metric of their blog’s value.)

__there are more eyeballs on the blogs than we can ascertain.

My take… however, these numbers are impossible to get for viewers and bloggers hosted by other sites. There’s no SRDS* in the EDA & IP social media world.

*SRDS was (is?) an organization that certified reader numbers for print publications so that they could charge advertising rates based on readership.

__engineers by and large are pretty quiet, shy types who rarely will comment or extend a discussion, even if they do read the blog, article and their accompanying comments.

My take…this came up a lot. I’m not sure…would their shyness prevent them from commenting? Probably. Would the relatively anonymous filter of the comment field encourage them to speak out? Potentially.

__by and large, the number of comments aren’t an accurate measure of eyeballs.

My take…lots of agreement that some sort of metric on value is reasonable, understandable. Less agreement on whether it’s needed now.

(One person compared the dilemma to the old attempt to measure column inches to value, which measures volume but doesn’t take into account perceptual, qualitative value.)

__commenting is a lot like getting a quote into an editorially-written article insofar as creating an authoritative voice that gets recognized, over time, as an industry voice to listen to…or not, depending on the content of the comment).

My take…one especially insightful editorial blogger felt that comments are a dynamic part of a living, breathing article that encompasses new perspectives with new comments and discussion.

One difference that I see is that the editor or author of the article hasn’t vetted the comment or incorporated it into his or her article. The comment is a response to the vetted article, which is the insightful editorial blogger’s point, I now see.

__the blog (and blogger) or article (and author) and its comments, to some degree, form a community onto each of themselves.

My take…this discussion got a bit abstract for me but I hear the notion. Help!

__this is a good time to talk about the expectations of each community (indie bloggers, editorial bloggers, company bloggers) and how to sync up each community so that there is value for everyone.

My take…but it’ll require the different goals and expectations of each community to somehow sync up so that each community’s efforts bring value to one another. How does that sync up with goals and expectations of customers, clients?

Of course, there’s no answer (yet) to the question about value here. The bloggers (indie, company and editorial) feel that there is value in commenting. Many of them agree that no one can measure value right now but that there ought to be some way to do so. Most everyone thinks that there is an existing, intangible value of being a voice of authority, an industry citizen.

And everyone thought we ought to keep talking about this issue.

Comments anyone?

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