Got a call from Rich Nass, brand director of Design News, about an important distinction within the UBM family. Design News and it's associated conferences are not part of UBM Tech. Rich works in the division know as UBM Canon, which was originally made up of the print properties that had been purchased a few years ago from Canon Communications, which had acquired the properties from Reed Elsevier, which previously belonged to.... Well, you get the idea, and yes it is hard to keep up with it all.

Anywho... UBM Canon is not out of the print game. Design News is still very much a print AND online enterprise with a healthy circulation (145,000) and online reach of over 300,000 and a boatload of conferences all dedicated to horizontal design industries including manufacturing, medical devices, packaging, pharma, etc.

However....

Like UBM Tech, UBM Canon considers itself a "community" driven by the input of it's audience. Rich says 75 percent of the content in Design News print and online is written by the readers. The remaining 25 percent is produced by the 10-person editorial staff. Also like UBMl, that staff "doesn't sweat over a story for two months to produce a 3,000 word article," but instead cranks out a series of much smaller articles every day for online and print publication.

So other than the print property, UBM Tech and UBM Canon are much the same philosophically.

Now do you think you have a clear idea what UBM is all about? Neither do I. I think I've got these two heads of the Hydra under control. We'll see.

News came in this morning that UBM is acquiring Canon Communications for $287 million. That means EDN will become part of the EE Times Group, once the sale is approved by US regulators.

It was just last February that Canon bought EDN, Test and Measurement World, Design News and Packaging Digest off the struggling Reed Business operation, followed by an ill-advised layoff of Robert Cravotta, picking up Rich Nass from Embedded Systems and the defection of Ron Wilson back to EE Times. At that point I was concerned about the future of EDN and T&M World because it was obvious from discussions within Canon that they really didn't understand what EDN was all about, even though they were a successful and profitable publishing company.

With this acquisition one might assume that EDN is not long for this world as they were an active competitor to EE Times, but a call with Paul Miller, CEO of the EE Times Group, this morning allayed that concern. Miller sees the value of EDN as complementary to what EE Times is doing going forward and now they don't have to worry about competition for ad dollars -- which is what the rivalry was all about going back to the days of Electronic News.

This acquisition is good news all around for electronics media coverage of the semiconductor industry because it brings the best and brightest under one roof. It's also good for UBM because it gives them a solid beachhead it the growing medical technology field. It's not great news for advertising buyers though. You're not going to be able to play of EDN coverage on EE Times to get a lower rate.

Time to start looking to your media buy budget, folks.

A clarification on UBM Canon

Holy crap! EE Times eats EDN!