Q&A with Light Reading’s Editor-in-Chief Ray Le Maistre and Editor-at-Large Carol Wilson

Tell us about the “new” Light Reading. Why now? How do the changes map to what’s going on in the industry?

Ray: Light Reading has been around for 13 years, so you could say that it was due a major shakeup. Over the years, there have been changes to design, new features added, and there have been acquisitions that expanded the focus of the site beyond optical transport into wireless and general telecom and then cable in order to make Light Reading a complete communications and networking title. But this is the first time that it has been stripped down and, in a sense, re-built, since 2000.

The industry that we’re focused on — telecom and cable — is undergoing a change that I would say is unprecedented since the introduction of widespread mobile communications. People have talked for a very long time about the convergence of telecom and IT and the migration to IP networks and away from legacy telecom infrastructure. We’ve now reached a point where the shift to IP is happening at the same time as a real convergence between telecom and IT, in terms of the introduction of cloud infrastructure and services, the prospects around SDN, and the greater prevalence of IP services, such as around unified communications.

This is all happening at the same time as changes in the way that people, whether it’s in the telecom sector or any other business vertical, consume the business-to-business content that they read and use for their jobs.

What do you think are the biggest changes in how people want to get information now, versus in the past? How about social media?

Ray: In the past, you would visit a website, read some stuff, get some emails, and you might post a comment on an article online. Now, social media has changed the way that people interact with each other and with the content they need. It’s incumbent upon publications such as Light Reading to change with the times.

So, along with the redesign, we’re introducing a lot more interactive functionality. I hasten to add that we’re not trying to be the new Facebook or the new Twitter. We’re not trying to create anything new from a technological viewpoint. We’re doing it from a viewpoint of — how do people want to get their information these days, compared to how they have done it in the past?

People still want to get information from an independent, trusted third-party, which would be us. But increasingly, they also want to get information from each other.

People have always gone to industry events and conferences because they’re not only listening to what people are saying from the podium or on webinars, but to meet people and to chat and to share ideas and make contacts and be part of a broader community. With the new features and functionality on Light Reading, we’re trying to create a greater sense of a community within the communications service provider space that would include communications service providers, telcos, cable operators, mobile operators, independents, over-the-top, their suppliers, and the users.

Carol: When they first asked me to come back, one of the things that intrigued me about this model was that when I started in telecom trade press back in 1985 at Telephony, we had a very different approach. It was much more the industry talking. While we wrote our own news, we were editing articles that were written by people within the industry. The core function of the magazine was helping the industry help itself and sharing things that went well one place that might work elsewhere.

What I like about the approach we’re taking at Light Reading is we’re getting back to what I think a telecom trade press site does that a regular news site can’t: help people address their job challenges. Help people see there are common things all network operators have to face. And they are not going to tackle them separately; the challenges are too massive. We want to help people collaboratively tackle some of those common challenges in a way that I think distinguishes what the telecom trade press does from what just a general news site does. It makes it much more useful and much more important to the people that are part of that community that Ray is describing.

Are you reaching out to new audiences?

Ray: One of the things we’ve done is reach out to the service provider community, to independent analysts and industry watchers, and to industry organizations like Test Labs, who play an almost neutral role in the industry.

We’ve asked them to share their views on what’s really happening in the industry, what’s hot, what the trends are. We have more than 50 contributors lined up from providers, local telcos to Tier 1s, marketing people to CTOs and CIOs. There will be contributors from Test Labs, industry organizations, data center operations, as well as industry analysts.

Is there a place for the end user on the new site?

Carol: There are high-level end users who will visit and occasionally comment, but they are not our target audience. Certainly there are those corporate IT folks at the enterprise level who are intrigued and want to keep up with what’s going on, but we’re focused on telecom and if it’s interesting to enterprise IT folks, that’s great.

Ray: I think we are going to be attracting more of the large enterprise users, not from our reporting of the industry, but from primarily our service provider contributors. The service providers are talking about the impact of big data and healthcare, what kind of changes technology is making to enterprises, whether they source globally or locally. Obviously, these are topics that are right in the heartland of the large enterprise CIO. I imagine these kinds of contributions from service providers will attract a greater interaction from the enterprise community that’s more often to be found on our sister publication Information Week.

There’s going to be a lot more crossover and collaboration as well between Light Reading and other publications within UBM Tech, but particularly with Information Week, as telecom and IT come together. For example, I just wrote a story on SDN on a company that was just as focused on enterprise networks as it was on service provider networks. That story is running on both Light Reading and Information Week.

What about the vendor and supply community?

Ray: There will be an element on the site called “The Virtual RFP” that involves propositions put to the industry. Basically we’re saying, “Okay, who thinks they’ve got the best idea about this?” All comers are invited to provide their responses — service providers, industry analysts, independent third parties.

For example, “What’s the best way to cache video content close to smartphone users?” You will find different suggestions from the industry about how that is best achieved.

Currently there’s lots of this kind of activity on LinkedIn, for example, but the only people who really get to benefit are the people in that particular group. We’re bringing that model to Light Reading and putting it in front of the 300,000 plus registered users we have and really broadening it out.

Carol: We moderate these conversations, and in terms of active discussion boards, we actively participate in them.

Ray: There’s no filtering or editing process, but we do keep an eye on the messages to remove and block users if somebody says anything that would be taken as spamming or racist or out of line.

Carol: However, in terms of people who are idiots and what they say, we encourage that . . .

Ray: General idiocy. Absolutely. If people want to go on and start challenging each other, or having general banter, then we’ll be stoking those fires.

Carol: Most of our readers think what we say is idiocy anyway, so . . .

Ray: There is 13 years of proof. . .

Let’s move on to Light Reading University. Can you tell us about its goals and offerings?

Ray: I approached Carol and said, “We have a new model and we would like to bring you back to the heart of the editorial team and be a real linchpin, running the new Light Reading University and being the glue, the person in the middle, who links up editorial, events, Heavy Reading analysts and Light Reading University.”

Carol is performing a very important role that I think very few people can perform and I couldn’t be happier to have her back. She was saying that when she worked in print magazines, she was always looking at ways to help people be able to do their jobs better. That’s a real driver for Carol and she’s a real engine. She’s got great drive and personality, excellent writer, she’s great talking to people, and she’s good at multimedia as well. Carol also recorded what I think is the funniest video that we’ve ever had on Light Reading — Buzzin’ at Ethernet Europe.