Today we lost two noble competitors. Reed Business Information announced this morning that they were closing a large number of magazines, including Control Engineering and Plant Engineering, and laying the staffs off immediately.
On the surface, we have lost some competition. But we have also lost some important and knowledgeable voices. We have lost some honorable tradition, too. Some of us have also worked at RBI, some of us have written for those magazines in a past life, and we all have friends who worked there.
We cannot help but be incredibly saddened by this event.
What it does NOT mean is that automation and plant operations are not served well by magazines. What this means is that the mega-giant Reed Business Information couldn't find buyers for some magazines that they no longer supported.
Magazine readership isn't going down. If anything, our data indicates that it is still going up. Yes, people surf the web for information, but they still want their magazines.
Why? It is about the difference between data, information, and actionable content. There's so much data around, even for somewhat abstruse things like automation, that we are nearly drowning in it. Even when you can extract information from all that data, you still have to have the ability to vet it, to confirm that it is correct, and that the conclusions you draw from it are valid. That's what makes actionable content, and that is what editors do.
Whether you consume our edits in our print magazines, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking, Plant Services, Chemical Processing, Food Processing and Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, or on our digital properties (websites like www.controlglobal.com, our blogs, podcasts and videos from the Process Automation Media Network, and the similar properties from our sister magazines) or attend our innovative events, like AutomationXchange, you get the benefit of that actionable content.
That's what we do.
One of the things about competition in media is that everybody takes a different slice at things, and has sometimes very different points of view. We chose, for example, to differently cover our slice of the manufacturing industries-- we set up three properties where Control Engineering had only one. This isn't to say that they were wrong, just that we were able to offer a different point of view. Having both was beneficial.
Now the ability to provide that actionable content is that much less.
And that is very sad.
I can make this promise: we will do everything we can at Putman, at Control, at ControlGlobal.com, to pick up the slack so that the amount of actionable content we edit will continue to benefit the automation end users, and the vendors who advertise with us.
To my friends at Control Engineering and Plant Engineering, as well as at some of the other shuttered magazines, I want to express how sad I am at this turn of events, and how much I wish you all well.
