Richard Goering finally let the world know what he was up to and it's pretty much what we expected. SCDsource.com will be an online newsletter that will contain contributed articles, viewpoints and coverage of EDA industry news and technology… all the things everyone came to expect from Richard over his long career at EE Times.
We don't know who else will be joining him editorially and we don't know who is funding the new venture. We do know venture capital within the EDA community is backing the play. One thing we know for sure: if the industry doesn't support this publication, it will also go away. That's what we all have to learn from this.
The media does not exist on charity. Someone has to pay the bill. Every form of media needs some combination of advertising, paid subscribers and industry sponsors to survive and thrive. Advertising is the traditional media support, but the EDA and electronics industries have not been all that consistent in media support in the past decade. For SCDsource.com, subscription support is possibly the better way and with Richard's name associated with it, there might be a lot of subscribers lining up. At least subscription money comes out of engineering budgets, not marketing. Subscription-supported media, however, is not cheap.
Industry sponsorship is the direction that New Tech Press is exploring, but rather than a few large sponsors, like PBS goes to, NTP is looking to support the bottom 80 percent of the market and produce a more egalitarian form of coverage. If SCDsource is looking at that model, that means we had the right idea and we have a trend growing in the B2B press.
What is very clear, however, is that the way niche industries like EDA, embedded and fabless semiconductors have been covered in the past is not going to last much longer, if it even exists today.
Welcome back, Richard. Let's shake this town up.
