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EDN articles are like raisin-bran muffins

Michael C Markowitz, Editor in Chief

Hello, Partner.

I say that be-cause EDN is a partnership be-tween you and our editors. Like any good partnership, each of us brings important attributes together to produce something that neither of us could independently produce as well. You bring to the partnership your interest in electronics, industry expertise, a desire to learn, and your influence to specify and purchase electronic products on behalf of your company. On our side, EDN brings its editors' design experience, big-picture perspective, in-dustry contacts, and analytic capabilities to bear in presenting you with useful information that helps you better do your jobs.

One of the ways we do this is by using a philosophy that former EDN editor Charles Small called the "raisin-bran muffin" theory. According to Chuck—who became famous for his observation that "93.65% of all statistics were made on the spot"—nobody eats raisin-bran muffins because they like the bran. Instead, people eat raisin-bran muffins because they like the raisins. The bran is just something they have to eat to get to the buried raisins. So, Chuck's thinking went, the objective was to bake a raisin-bran muffin with all of the raisins on the outside of the muffin, so raisin lovers could pick them off and discard the bran.

Forget for a moment Chuck's strange perspective on pastries—I, for one, happen to like both the raisins and the bran. If you think about it, his philosophy creates a useful way to present information in an article. With the raisins representing little nuggets of information and the text representing the bran, articles are really just an amalgam of raisins and bran mixed up in a muffin. Irrespective of what you think of muffins made of raisins and bran, your objective as a reader is to pick off the conceptual raisins without eating too much of the bran.

And that pretty well defines part of our approach. But not all of it. If all EDN did was bake great muffins, you'd probably go to another bakery for your bread. Although we'd like to encourage you to try other bakeries to keep us on our toes, we're going to work hard to make sure that our bread continues to satisfy you better than all others. And we're prepared to make adjustments to our old family recipe now and again to suit your changing needs and tastes.

So, partner, pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee or tea, have a few bites of our raisin-bran muffins or bread, and let us know how we're doing. We want to make sure you keep coming back for more.