Is EE Times Outsourcing Journalism?

From reading earlier posts in this blog, you know that I regularly read EE Times. It's my main publication covering the business and technology of Electronics, Semiconductors, and EDA. I find it more relevant than my IEEE publications!

But, lately I've become concerned about cutbacks.

• First they downsized the size of the papers (physically), and eliminated that funky old favorite "Immortal Works".
• Next, they made substantial staff cutbacks, including axing Richard Goering and their Editor in Chief.

Maybe this is the inevitable consequence, but lately I've noticed that many of their features are written by industry sources rather than full-time journalists. In moderation, this isn't a bad thing. Practicing engineers can give a valuable real-world perspective on problems we're seeing and how to solve them. But in excess, I'm worried that EE Times will become a collection of "advertorials". Indeed, some of the articles I read from "industry voices" proceed to describe some very specific, not widely recognized problem, and then lay out a solution: which, coincidentally, happens to be exactly the problem the author's company addresses! This can be self-serving and less than objective.

Let's hope that industry publications will strike a healthy balance between problems encountered by in-the-trenches engineers and objective analysis of the major issues and trends. There is significant value in traditional journalism. What else are you gonna do, get all your news and opinions from blogs??? :-)