Prescription for Spin

A t the time I'm writing this in late August, the Democratic Convention is just getting underway in Chicago. Yesterday, a spokesperson for the GOP announced that the Republicans would hold daily press conferences in Chicago during the convention so they can provide the "other side of the story." They have offered to bus members of the press to and from these press conferences. Not surprisingly, Republicans want to put their own spin on the week's events. In much of the information that both parties provide through press conferences and press releases, spin is a key factor.

Also not surprisingly, the technical press is no stranger to rotational influences, often from advertisers, and it's up to editors to detect and zero out the spin. If they don't succeed, they do their readers a disservice. Cathryn Baskin, editor of PC World , recently commented that some readers question the editorial objectivity of computer magazines, fearing that advertisers influence editorial content, and she commenced to refute the idea that such influence exists. This concern is an occupational hazard of the press. Some readers of Embedded Systems Programming , for example, have remarked acerbically on this magazineýs coverage of 32-bit processors, claiming that we neglect 8-bit processors. This is not a fault that we wish to succumb to, given that the 32-bit processors represent what industry observer Nick Tredennick refers to as the zero-volume portion of the market.

Vendors spend a great many public relations and advertising dollars to get their message out, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The alternative is sometimes described as "field of dreams" marketing, which makes the erroneous assumption that if you build a better mousetrap, consumers will know about it through some sort of osmotic effect and come running to your door, Visa cards in hand.

However, you won't find a correlation between marketing dollars spent and the quality of a product, so while marketing efforts may make people aware of a product, they donýt make it work any better. From an editorial perspective, vendors do have a role to play: they are the experts on a given product. They can help fulfill engineers' information needs by, for example, explaining the architecture of a microcontroller and how to program it. But it is inappropriate for vendors to pitch the product within the editorial content of the magazine, by citing features and benefits. Nor is it appropriate for an editor to extol a product based on advertising dollars spent. The information that vendors want to provide does not necessarily correspond to the information engineers need to have be successful in their jobs.

Embedded Systems Programming aims to be a more of a methodology resource than a product resource. Even so, products are not entirely neglected because we do include new product announcements and sometimes publish articles that deal with products in a way that we think will be useful to a sufficiently large group of readers to warrant their inclusion. While our intention is to publish useful, nonpartisan information, if you detect subliminal product pitches, let me know. Just as it is necessary to recognize the spin that opposing political parties put on each other's positions, it's also necessary for editors to distinguish fact from fancy in the information they provide to their readers.