Besides Loring Wirbel, Rich Wallace has also been let go at EE Times.

More details will follow but it seems Techinsights is on the retreat from their traditional business. Officially, the editorial staff at EE Times is intact. Rich and Loring were not considered editorial staff. Rich was essentially tasked with coordinating all the various content vehicles that Techinsights has acquired. Loring took the job, originally offered to Brian Fuller, of managing the EE Times Market intelligence division. Seems like a bad choice on Loring's part in hindsight.

Techinsights as a company has had great success with their events (Embedded Systems Conference being the big dog) and Semiconductor Insights, acquired last year, provides the analysis division making Loring redundant. Loring is a great journalist and will either be picked up by some other publication or can make a pretty good living as a freelancer.

The tough decision had to be Rich Wallace. Techinsights has acquired a lot of content providers over the past few years, including TechOnline. But the material all the different components puts out is not well integrated. The EE Times search engine is not comprehensive. Rich had the job of putting all that together and he got that job just a few months ago. It obviously isn't done.

There were more layoffs but the extent won't be announced until Friday. They included advertising, events and support staff. It makes sense from a business perspective. If companies aren't advertising then why do you need advertising staff. And no advertising cuts into the content production and, I guess, the integration of that content.

But it's not just Techinsights going through this process. PC magazine announced just an hour ago that they were going 100 percent digital and closing down the monthly print publication. We can probably expect layoff announcements from them in editorial in the next few months.

It's time we all started rethinking how journalism is done, especially in the technology B2B world.