Priorty Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia When Boilerplates Won't Do

When a niche magazine like Circuit Cellar INK promotes a message, it's called an eccentricity. When a major trade magazine promotes a message, it's called an industry trend. It is often only in hindsight that a cause championed by the minority gains due respect. Let me explain.

Like Circuit Cellar INK, many technical magazines have Web sites that offer supplemental materials. It's no secret. The object is to create traffic and sell advertising. The difference is, trade magazines are now discovering something we've known all along.

All magazines base their advertising charges on circulation and audience demographics. In the case of the electronic trade magazines, large companies pony up $12,000 per advertising page to supposedly reach 100,000 engineering managers, department heads, and CEOs (everyone a purchasing-decision maker, mind you). Given that most of us who fall in one of these categories have piles of unread trade magazines on the corner of our desk, I suspect that real readership is considerably less. Of course, since circulation is based on the number sent and not the number actually read, the mailbox continues to overflow.

The digital realities of Web advertising throw a major wrench in the works, however. The statistical packages from most ISPs track the physical number of visitors to a site, a page, and even to specific advertisements. The potential circulation might be infinite (the whole Internet), but the real circulation is only the record of who actually comes to the site or a page.

With banner ads on some of these trade magazine sites going for $6000 per month, they have a vested interest in getting you to their site. But, that's the rub! Searching the Internet for relevant technical information is not the typical activity of engineering managers, department heads, and CEOs. Most of the Web surfers I meet aren't delegating the tasks; they're performing the tasks. They're most attracted to sites that offer application information that simplifies that task.

It takes guts to buck tradition. A specific example is the online news and technical resource publication, EDTN (www.edtn.com). EDTN is a joint venture between Aspect Development Inc. and CMP Media Inc. You're probably more familiar with CMP. In addition to their recent purchase of BYTE, they publish EE Times, Electronic Buyers News, Semiconductor Business, and about 40 other trade magazines. In the process of building their Web site, EDTN came to the inevitable conclusion that the typical trade-magazine boilerplate won't satisfy this crowd. They have to avoid the traditional trade-magazine-formula approach to editorial in the all-important design sections. That's when our name came up.

Beginning this month, Circuit Cellar INK will be providing the editorial content for the embedded-control section of EDTN's EE Design Online. I applaud EDTN's boldness in the face of obvious politics. Ultimately, the marriage of their wide audience and our real-world content should benefit both of us. It also demonstrates what others, like Hamilton-Hallmark which posts my editorial each month, have known all along: Circuit Cellar INK offers high-quality technical information.

Electronic media changes don't stop there, however. It has always been frustrating to me that we have considerably more editorial than we have pages available in the magazine. This month we inaugurate a new section on our Web site called Design Forum. It's a subscriber bonus section that contains new monthly articles, feature columns, and design projects.

Each month will contain an additional Silicon Update from Tom Cantrell. We've always felt that one column a month hardly covered his West Coast investigations, so now there are two. Lessons From The Trenches is a new column by George Martin. George and I have worked together on many projects over the years. He's the guy I call when I need help. Lessons From the Trenches documents some of the design lessons he's learned the hard way. Design Forum will also contain design hints and new feature articles. Because we aren't limited for space, these projects will typically contain more example listings and illustrations.

Finally, Design Forum solves a real problem for me. When we conduct a contest with the overwhelming success of Design98, it results in a lot of publishable projects. We print the winning projects in the magazine, but there are dozens of others of equal value. As only one of the judges, my top picks weren't necessarily always the winners. As the publisher, however, I get a way to show my top choices to you. PIC Abstractions is a selection of PIC projects from our Design98 contest.

One of the first projects is a personal favorite of mine. It is for a 128 × 240 LCD graphing weather monitor that displays a 48-h moving graph of pressure and temperature. Even if you don't build one yourself, stop by and take a look at the pictures. You'll be amazed at the sophistication and performance of this little device.

So, is anything really different? Our message has remained the same through the years. The people who build all the electronic gadgets we take for granted want a source of reliable design information, and we have provided it. Some may call our mission an eccentricity. I'd rather think of it as an industry trend.

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: August-1998