Penton Media has formed the Design Engineering and Sourcing Group, combining several Penton brands including Electronic Design, Electronic Design Europe, Machine Design and Source ESB. By merging mechanical and electronic titles, Penton claim they will be able to target the entire design engineering team (and they underlined “entire” in the press release so it must be true!).
The move makes a lot of sense: the line between mechanical and electronic engineering is fuzzy at best, and in some cases there is a complete crossover. As an “electronics engineer”, I designed aluminium extrusions, front panel metalwork and created controllers for many motorised systems. So this move makes a lot of sense.
I did, however, cringe at the positioning of the move as looking “not at historical or traditional print models, but on a new media process”, and the focus on “brand directors and brand champions”. I guess that jobs like “publisher” are just no longer cool. The release, however, did make me sympathise with the editors at Penton who no doubt have the same feelings about the many over-hyped press releases they receive each day.
