Welcome to PR Vibes™, created by Calysto Communications to provide you with key insights into the publications and events in the telecommunications industry. Today, we’re featuring a short interview with Carol Wilson, editor-in-chief of Connected Planet and Wayne Madden, Penton Media’s Digital Media and Communications Division market leader. The reason we are doing this Q&A now is there has been some confusion in the industry about the 2 brands – Telephony and Connected Planet. This is our attempt to clear up that confusion. Please let us know if we can help more!
Connected Planet brings focus to the technologies and real-world examples that demonstrate how the combination of IT and pervasive networking technologies is transforming the way the world communicates, collaborates, shares/stores information, manages resources and is entertained.
We hope this is helpful for you!
PR Vibes Interview Q&A
What is the editorial mission of Connected Planet?
Carol: We are still an industry trade publication for service providers, but we are broadening our focus to include enterprise users of telecom and IT, including top tech buyers at big hospitals, utility companies, large enterprises, school districts, local and state government and manufacturers. We will focus on the top end of that market, the people at those organizations who are looking to buy telecom, IT and networking technologies to transform their businesses.
What are some of the challenges in implementing this broadened focus?
Carol: Each of our core group of five writers is taking on new industries. I am covering healthcare, telemedicine and electronic medical records. Sarah Reedy will add energy and utilities to her mobile beat, covering smart grid technology and remote energy management, as well as some connected home issues. Kevin Fitchard is looking at machine-to-machine communications. Ed Gubbins is taking on municipal networks, government and school districts. Rich Karpinski rejoins us as executive editor-features, covering Telco 2.0 services, as well as automated manufacturing and supply chain management.
I have been talking to people in the healthcare industry, and I’m discovering they have their own acronyms, and they assume I know what they are talking about, when I don’t. I’ve been covering telecom for more years than I care to admit, and now I’m thrown back to my early years, asking lots of basic questions. It’s definitely a challenge to take on new beats, but it’s also fun and exciting to be doing this while healthcare reform talks are going on.
We are going several steps deeper into our stories. Although we are still connected to the service providers we have been serving, now we are also talking to their customers and partners, providing more in-depth solutions that telecom can bring to improve health care, education, energy management, etc. We will also continue to cover the overall infrastructure requirements, technologies and business strategies that drive the market.
How long has this new brand been in the works?
Carol: Wayne is always thinking about ways we can improve. He has been talking with me about this since he took over as publisher of Telephony a little over a year ago, so we’ve been kicking this around for quite a while. The decision to actually take the leap and begin the process of shutting down Telephony and launching Connected Planet began in earnest in late spring, early summer. We knew whenever we made the change, it would be an intense period.
Wayne: We started thinking a while back about where the market is really going, in terms of its future. Telephony was more than 100 years old in terms of serving the market, and we looked at the landscape and the market, trying to find that next place. It wasn’t an issue of how we could be more competitive but where our customers and advertisers are going. Where are the new entrants getting involved? What is driving communication from now into the future is the spending on solutions that actually change things, enable new ways of doing business and new applications that drive use and need of telecom. We are seeing new competitors and issues to solve. Municipalities and utilities are getting into the fray with smart grid technology and one wire to the house, and they are partnering with wireless companies. We took a blank-slate approach, asking ourselves, “Where should we be for the next long period in the area of telecommunications?” The creative process took a long while and needed to bubble up, but we believe we are early into this whole new world and taking a leadership position there.
What is your vision for the publication?
Carol: If you look at critical challenges the country is facing with economic development, healthcare reform, reducing the carbon footprint, enabling businesses to be more cost effective, making government more accessible, improving education and training and bringing all kinds of services to people in rural areas—telecom is at the heart of solutions to each of those challenges. We are focusing on what those solutions are and bringing those out to industry.
We will also address barriers standing in the way of solutions and approaches that didn’t work. Some articles may cover a solution that’s trying to work, but maybe there are not enough standards in place yet. Connected Planet will focus on that core problems that telecom solutions can address. I believe that pervasive networking and telecom solutions can make almost anything you talk about more efficient.
Wayne: In Connected Planet, we’re not talking about how to do telecom, but what to do with it. What is telecom doing for our world now? We will continue to cover how carriers are improving their infrastructure to serve those markets, but the world is starting to be connected in a real way, wherever we are, with different devices. Telecom will drive spending in the future in new ways haven’t thought of yet. That’s why we named the publication Connected Planet.
What are some of the topics you will be covering over the next year?
Carol: Some of the areas we are following include smart grids, broadband stimulus, electronic health records and networking medical facilities, remote health monitoring, municipal networks, e-government initiatives, server virtualization and data center efficiency, automated manufacturing, machine-to-machine communications, home networking including ZigBee, Z-Wave, HPNA, MoCA, HomePlug and high definition wireless, mobile applications and mobile advertising.
How will you handle content?
Carol: We are encouraging people to stop thinking in the old ways where you write stories for the magazine and then place those stories on the Website. We are a Web-first publication, so anything we write goes quickly to the Web. We then take the best of what has been on the Web and condense it for the monthly print magazine. Sometimes, we will take the essence of the Web coverage on a specific topic and create a print story. For example, if we plan a cover feature on telecom jobs, we will write several stories for the Web while doing research, then synthesize them into one article that we can deliver to people who prefer the print format. The magazine will contain the essence of all the journalism we have done throughout the previous month.
We are not in the commodity-based news business anymore, but we will still cover news in the context of how it affects the bigger picture. We no longer will follow every news release that comes along, but if the news fits into our Connected Planet model, we will cover it. That said, we are all news junkies here, so it may take us a while to get into this new mode.
The editorial calendar will be more general than in the past, and it will be more in flux. We want to make sure we are giving our readers the best of what we can deliver to them, which will benefit advertisers as much as readers.
Telephony.com continues. We have a lot of loyal online readers, and we didn’t want to take that away from them. However, it will be the home of Connected Planet.
Wayne: We are not abandoning the core market we serve. We are not going to miss things in our market from a news standpoint that makes sense for us to cover, but we have created other ways for our readers to get news and product information, which frees up our editors to focus on value-added content and the beats they are covering. The From the Web aggregated content section will continue, so readers can get news that way.
The Briefing Room is a tool on TelephonyOnline’s home page that allows PR representatives to paste press announcements for their clients. The tool had worked well for some of Penton Media’s other properties, so was added to TelephonyOnline. PR reps register to become contributors, which allows them to post releases. We may be expanding what media professionals can post in the Briefing room to include case studies and other types of content.
So, from what you’re saying it sounds like TelephonyOnline and the Telephony newsletters will continue – as the How to do Telecom – with its loyal readership. Then Connected Planet becomes an extension of the 100-year old Telephony with a new direction as well as a focus on the application of telecom, is this correct?
Telephonyonline.com is still our Web location and will be home to Connected Planet through the transition, as we add an audience that is not entirely service provider based. We will continue the Telephonyonline.com e-newsletters through the final transition to Connected Planet as well.
Who is the key target audience? How will it be different than Telephony’s?
Wayne: We are launching this to an expansion of our existing audience. People who have done business with us in past can now subscribe to Connected Planet. We also have a couple thousand subscribers from different industries, the IT area of healthcare or utilities, for example, and we are going continue to expand our audience to include the appropriate folks in these various industries. Penton has publications in different markets, so look for us to do some creative projects with our sister Websites to get our information out to their industries.
How does this launch affect your other “value-added services,” such as your e-newsletter strategy? Conferences? Website? Blogs?
Carol: Right now, the newsletters will continue to have the Telephony.com brand because they are tied to the website. Again, because we are Web first, all content shows up there.
Wayne: Historically, publishers produced magazines, and when they later added Websites, they posted only the magazine content and used the same name as the magazine, If we never change telephonhyonline.com, it wouldn’t matter, because it is its own entity. We have had a lot more content—such as Webcasts and the Briefing Room—on that site than has been in the magazine. We don’t want people to get hung up on the name. It’s not a one-for-one comparison—Connected Planet is a product of telephonyonline.com, not vice versa.
We are not doing a one-day event before Supercomm this year. We made the decision because this has been a tough year for people in terms of attending events, and we have a lot on our plates. We will continue to do online events. As for live events, we are looking at them, and we may do them in a completely different way next year.
What’s keeping you up at night?
Carol: One, we are often up late at night working. We have a very large volume of work now. We are cultivating new sources and we don’t know what we don’t know yet. We have spent a lot of time meeting with the staff. We know we need to get up to speed quickly on a lot of new ground, but in addition to having a lot of work, there is a sense of excitement. We have been holding regular meetings, working through tasks on a spreadsheet to make sure we are getting everything done.