Between The Lines

I’ve had a bit of an epiphany since Richard Goering was let go from EE Times. Shortly after learning about the layoff and writing about it, I started to see a ton of messages on various websites that essentially indicated trusted, independent EDA press coverage no longer existed because Goering was gone. Perhaps most surprising was many of these reports were coming from longtime readers, colleagues and friends. EDA analyst Gary Smith in a blog comment on a PR site said “In our industry Richard Goering was the trusted source and when he was laid off from it left a big hole in our infrastructure.” And the same PR person--who is now pitching the idea of charging small EDA companies a few thousand bucks to have an “objective” EDA journalist write up your news story that he will then apparently get posted in a seemingly reputable publication (???)--is going around Silicon Valley saying quite incorrectly “there are only 4 EDA features scheduled for 2008(???)” I don't believe the entire EDA press corps only has 4 features scheduled. (EDN doesn’t even have its 2008 calendar posted yet so I’m not sure what the heck he’s talking about???)

At any rate, while I agree that Richard Goering is a great journalist and has proven over the years that he is indeed a trusted source for EDA related coverage (Richard was my mentor at my 7.5 years at EE Times), he certainly is not THE only trusted source. I asked Gary to justify his comments in the blog and shared that I was a bit hurt because going around saying Richard is “THE trusted source” implies that the rest of us covering EDA (myself, Ann Mutchler, Dave Maliniak, and there are quite a few others) are not trusted sources or are not to be trusted. Gary then wrote to me saying “You don’t “QA” product introductions.  Engineers look at you for in-depth analysis.”

Gaaaaaaaah....Ever since I’ve been at EDN, I’ve written up just about every significant product story that has come my way and I don’t regurgitate press releases—I actually speak to the vendors. I inquired to my old friend John Cooley about it too and he said, “yep, you’re like me—you’re an opinion guy.” I asked him “have you ever seen my product write ups or my news stories in EDN?” He basically said, “you do product write ups?” Luckily, he has seen many of my news stories and has once or twice even linked to a blog (EETimes, our competitor, sells ads for Cooley’s site but lets him write what he wants so seemingly Cooley links to my aritcles sparingly).

Here is where the epiphany comes in-- It seems that now that I have a blog and it runs upfront on the EDN website and tends to be a bit provocative that some folks think my blog “Between the Lines” is all I do at EDN. In fact, the blog is only ¼ of my workload. Indeed, most of my time is spent doing good old journalism--product interviews and writeups, writing those long and involved features EDN has always been famous for, attending/covering conferences, writing up selective news scoops (M&A and tidbits). Ann Mutschler also carries a heavy load of news coverage in EDA (and other beats) and covers newsish events like M&A, funding, court coverage and does a bang up job covering conferences like DAC and DesignCon. EE trade pub legend Ron Wilson, EDN’s executive editor, also covers EDA industry stuff from time to time in his focus on IC design methodology for EDN. No Trusted Sources in the EDA press? Four EDA features scheduled for 2008?

In speaking with Gary and Cooley, I think part of the problem is that some readers are unfamiliar with how to navigate our “design centers” on the EDN website. All the EDA news and product coverage we do gets captured in one bucket: the IC Design Center. As it stands today if you want to see the depth and breadth of news and product coverage you have to go to the IC Design Center tab on the front page (which has the latest coverage), hit the button that says “more on IC Design” and then if you want to see all the products we’ve covered and news, click the tab that says “News,” then click “more”--voile you’ll see page after page of EDA related news items, product coverage, features and contributed pieces that Ann, Ron and I and contributors have put in EDN and eNews over these many years. I know a lot of folks are using my blog “Between the Lines” as their entry point via RSS or bookmarks (and I appreciate it), but if you want to get a more well-rounded view of what’s going on in EDA, not just my blog opines, I suggest you RSS and bookmark the IC Design Center too. You’ll see EDA, IP, and FPGA related news, products coverage as well as my blog. Yes, I do QA products--the significant ones.

I hope most readers have been using the IC Design Center and are enjoying the coverage. We’re constantly working to make the EDN site easier to use. So in short, the EDA product coverage, the grand EDN features, the news as well as the EDA opinions/blogs are there at the IC Design Center-- you just may have to dig a bit in our site to find it. Can the source of this information be “Trusted?” I hope Ann, Ron and I have proven over the many years we’ve been covering this small but quite rambunctious industry that indeed we can be trusted.

 Thanks for reading!