There won’t be any 50th-anniversary commemorative edition of Electronic News. The paper stopped publishing a print edition at the end of 2002, but Electronic News survives as a news Web site for the semiconductor industry, under the ownership of Reed Business Information US.
(Full disclosure: Electronic News was my employer for 17 years, including two years as the paper’s editor-in-chief.)
In its early years, Electronic News had the field to itself. It started publishing before Sputnik was launched, before Fairchild Semiconductor was incorporated, and before the integrated circuit was invented. Created by Fairchild Publications, the paper thrived on covering the US military, the aerospace industry, and the nascent semiconductor industry, which was nurtured by NASA and the Department of Defense. Electronic News soon branched out to cover the burgeoning computer industry. The phrase “Silicon Valley” was coined by an Electronic News editor to describe the dense accumulation of companies in the Santa Clara Valley.
Electronic News grew to become the second most profitable paper in the Fairchild stable. The staff grew along with it, with a couple dozen editors in New York, a full-fledged copy desk, and news bureaus across the country. Competition arrived in the early ‘70s, when CMP Media started up two weeklies, Electronic Buyer’s News and Electronic Engineering Times. Those papers not only drew off some of Electronic News’s advertisers; they also hired away editors, paying better salaries.
The semiconductor industry downturn of 1985 severely wounded Electronic News. The page count dropped to less than 100, as semiconductor companies and their suppliers cut their marketing budgets. The paper never really recovered — editors were laid off and bureaus were closed. Fairchild cast off the publication to sister company Chilton Publishing.
The last two decades haven’t been kind to Electronic News. Big chip companies, like Intel and Texas Instruments, started advertising in consumer media instead. That left Electronic News relying on second-tier distributors and its classified ads section. There were multiple changes of ownership; it was sold to Cahners Publishing (now Reed Business Information US) just as another industry downturn hit.
Management was myopic about the Internet. No one secured the domain names, enews.com or electronicnews.com, and so enews.com was taken by a company that sold consumer magazine subscriptions. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but Electronic News seemed to have been run by people who couldn’t even spell Internet, much less figure out how to use it.
Reed pulled the plug on the print edition of Electronic News four years ago, laying off all but a handful of editors, who now maintain the Web site. Though Electronic News as a newsgathering organization may be a shadow of its former self, we all have fond memories of “EN,” as we called it (anyone who called it “E-News” was strictly an outsider), and many war stories to tell from the days when Electronic News was the bible of the semiconductor industry.
Comments
Brian Santo Says:
March 23rd, 2007 at 8:51 am
It was a good training ground, and former EN’ers have infiltrated the entire industry, don’t forget.
Chad Fasca Says:
March 24th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Wow. 50 years. There was something special about working for EN. Though I joined toward the end of EN’s lifecycle, I fondly recall my time at the paper. While its glory days had passed, you knew that it played an important role in the industry and in establishing the technology trade press, so you cared about continuing that rich history. It left enough of an impression that we all kept up with the paper after we left and we mourned the print edition’s passing.
Michael Millenson Says:
August 17th, 2007 at 5:46 am
In the mid-1970s, I was an editor and reporter for Electronic News’ sister publication, Energy User News. The founding editor of EUN, Bob Butler, had worked at Electronic News beforehand. He went on to fame as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer, Robert Olen butler.
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