Not all that many people know that I joined EDTN a while ago. Those of my acquaintance know that I was the Analog Editor at one of the most prestigious print trade magazines for design engineers in this country. The question that I have been asked by the few that do know of my move is, "Why?" At this first editorial opportunity on the Analog Avenue of EDTN it is a good question to look at.

Print publications are not going away in the near future; people like the look and feel of the print media and enjoy the transportability. It is not yet that easy to set up your laptop in every corner of our world and gain Internet access. Yes, it is going to get easier with all the different personal communications standards that are here and that are going to come, but before it happens there is still time for those of us who value it, to have the ability to switch off and go fish. Hiding from the communications systems in the future is going to be more difficult.

What the print publications do well is to bring you good information with a timeliness that should normally be appropriate for your work; but you probably never have time to completely scan any magazine, so you almost certainly have a favorite that gives you a fair amount of what you need. But what do you do in the analog world? As the barristers in England would say to a witness in the Old Bailey, "I would put it you that you have few places to go!"

Lack of Print Space

The limitations of print are based on the sheer ink space available and the editorial support for a particular niche. There are a number of dynamics working simultaneously that should be understood. The absolute number of pages available for editorial is a percentage of the total pages of the magazine. If the ad salespeople ("space reps") sell more pages then there are more pages available for editorial. A typical editorial ratio is about 45 percent, but it can be higher, and publishers love it lower; the increase in profits in cutting editorial from 45 to 40 percent is massive.

Given that number of pages available for the editors to fill, what happens to it? Well, if you look at a serious publication you won't see stuff that was written just to please the advertisers. Giving editorial coverage in exchange for advertising has certainly happened and maybe it sounds good for business? In fact, the more that publications separate "church" and "state" the better the publication is received on both sides. However, you obviously have to cover the topic areas of your advertisers otherwise there is no point in them being there, if there is no coverage of "5-pole widgets" then the design engineers who want them will turn elsewhere -- and so will the advertiser.

So, what you thought was a fairly thick publication starts to look skinnier for your arena. Only 45 percent of the pages are editorial and the remainder gets shared with digital ICs, embedded systems, software, power supplies, well, you get the picture. What ends up as real analog coverage is more like the dog's tail than any real part of the dog.

Added to this, and just as in the design arena, there is a real shortage of engineers-come-editors who actually understand or want to understand analog. The end result is that our beloved analog technologies are probably the worst-covered in the trades, with most of the stuff published being hackneyed versions of what the manufacturers would like to see written.

That is not where I want to be.

The Benefits of the Net

What's different about EDTN's Analog Avenue? We don't have an editorial ratio. We don't have space limitations. We don't have any delay in telling the story. We don't have restrictions on feedback.

I LIKE THAT!

The whole of Analog Avenue is an open canvas. As an analog engineer who has also spent his life in love with, and has earned his living from, words, I have been given the canvas, totally expandable in all directions, and the materials needed to cover that canvas in meaningful, practical ways. For me things really don't get any better than that. Throw in working for someone who was my boss before, and who I have a high regard for; throw in the desire to succeed that is evident in the EDTN group; throw in the support that I hear from the analog manufacturers (who well know that I write not what they want, but what I think is important) and we have a well-defined product that I am convinced you will not ignore.

Those are some of the reasons I am here. They are also some of the reasons, I believe, why you will want to put us in your address book and why you will visit us every week for analog news, and to view the changes in addition to our daily newsletter on our Home Page.

By: Paul McGoldrick
Sr. Technology Editor, EDTN

Analog Main | Product of the Week | Columns | Editorial | Tech Notes

		Click here to get your listing up.