This article appeared in Electronic Design and has been published here with permission.
If you haven’t kept up, you might not know (or care) that our publications are now part of Endeavor Business Media. The transition took place at the beginning of the year. These days I have an Endeavor email address. You can find out the latest contact info on the Contact Us page.
I’ve been through a number of transitions with Electronic Design since I started back in 2000. Then it was Penton Media and I had a Penton email address. Somewhere in the middle there were other transitions, including being gobbled up by Informa. That prompted the usual Informa email address.
Unfortunately, the transition to Endeavor didn’t result in forwarding of email using all of those old email addresses. I suspect that a number of marketeers don’t check bounces from their email blasts or simply drop emails that are no longer valid.
I already get too many emails, with most getting tossed in the virtual trash, so it was hard to determine who did and did not know about this. Lately, I’ve had quite a few emails about why I hadn’t responded to their earlier emails. They’re using the new email address that was probably found via the Contact Us page, as the old emails don’t work. It has meant missing out on previews of some new products, but luckily not ones that are too significant.
Those I’ve recently conversed with who send me emails via Reply wind up using my new email, since that’s where things are coming from these days. What really messes things up is when they’re using old address book messages. Worse, sometimes they use all of the old email addresses, so I get multiple instances of the same issue.
The other thing you may have noticed was our website transition. This was fraught with the usual headaches as companies like to unify their website support. That’s not a bad idea, but given the lack of consistency around web platforms, you might guess that any transition like moving to a new company results in a major change—at least on the back end. We actually maintained a pretty close configuration between the Informa and Endeavor platforms.
On the plus side, the Endeavor platform, called BASE, is nice with some useful features we didn’t have before, like easy creation of digital publications. Check out:
Each now has a “Top Stories of the Week” that you can check out. Likewise, the digital editions of our print publications can be found there as well. These are all well-kept secrets that we’re working to highlight on the home page. However, some things do go rather slowly when it comes to company-wide website changes.
We’ve also been able to consolidate our resources pages:
You can find more stuff like our popular Series Library and TechXchanges. Of course, the digital publications, newsletters, and print edition info is there as well.
It has definitely been interesting going through all of these transitions over the years. I started out as a technology editor covering a couple areas and now have to contend with three publications, webcasts, and other things that weren’t common when we started out.
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated many more new avenues, including a plethora of virtual conferences, but that’s another article.
So, if you want to send me something, you need to use my Endeavor email address, [email protected]. If you haven’t heard back from me using my old email address, you now know why.
