Unbelievably this is the 1000th post I’ve made to Napier News. As it will soon be Christmas (my children are already bursting with excitement, even though there are nearly three weeks to go) I thought it might make sense to write out my European electronics media wish list to Santa.
Dear Santa
I’ve been very good boy this year and have worked very hard. Please could I have some presents this Christmas?
Firstly I’d like engineers to keep their knowledge up to date. When I finished my degree I knew very little and had to read lots of magazines to learn how to be a good engineer. I needed to read, as I simply couldn’t ask the right questions, so why do engineers now think that they can learn all they know by typing a few words into Google?
Please can you tell publishers to continue investing in editorial content. I know that editors cost money, but surely cutting editorial quality is going to eventually mean that no one wants to read the magazine? Surely great editorial will help get more readers, online traffic and advertising revenue?
I don’t understand why websites in the electronics industry are so slow to adopt new media. It seems that whilst publishers are happy to make a couple of quick edits to press release texts to create an online story, they won’t put any video on the website unless its recorded and produced by a team of professional producers. What about recording interviews using Skype? Some of the editors record interviews, so why don’t they just post the audio on the website. Please can you tell them that new media doesn’t need to be difficult!
Whilst I’m talking about online, why can’t publishers create more analysis that would really add value to engineers? Jeff Jarvis has been talking about topic pages for a long time, and this idea would be perfect for the electronics industry. Yet the topic pages that have been generated seem to be written and then forgotten.
Finally please can you help publishers and editors to make better use of social media? I know a lot of engineers don’t use social media, but do we really have to believe that the pinnacle of social media in our industry was EE Times revealing Dr. Nicely’s discovery of the famous Pentium FDIV bug to the world after a forum post.
Thank you Santa. I promise I’ll leave a carrot out for Rudolph.
Love from
Mike
p,s. If you have time, please could I also have an end to the recession, world peace, new killer applications and a chance to drive the Bloodhound SSC.
