In a perfect world, a magazine would have sufficient editorial staff and expertise to write all of its own articles. This is certainly not the case in the CAD, CAM and CAE industry, where most publications toil with a bare bones staff and a lean editorial budget. To fill the pages, publications use contracted writers that vary from professional authors, users, and more than ever before--vendors.
When I was with CADENCE, we had one author (columnist Lynn Allen) who worked for the company (Autodesk) that made the product (AutoCAD) she wrote about. Nowadays, the number of pages filled with vendor written articles abound.
Take the most recent issue of April 2006 issue of Desktop Engineering site:
- HPC for the Road Ahead - about computers at Ford, written by Srinivas Kodiyalam and Stan Posey, both of whom work for SGI, a workstation manufacturer
- Leveraging Data - about EDM, written by Jerry Waxler, who works for Synergis. Synergis makes EDM software
- Commentary - by Buzz Kross of Autodesk
- Beyond Backsolving - about calculation software, by Tom Lee of Maplesoft, makers of calculation software
Cadalyst runs vendor written articles, too. So does Machine Design.
The advantages of running vendor written articles are:
- They're almost always free. Vendors don't demand cash to write like most authors do.
- Vendor articles are usually well written and the typical vendor is very knowledgeable about the subject they are writing about (although they are likely to contain biases towards their own products)
- Publishers love to exploit the goodwill generated from getting an article published. How can an executive turn down an advertising campaign with a magazine that was kind enough to give him/her several pages--for free--to espouse their views to thousands of potential customers?
So what's the problem? Vendor articles can be informative and interesting. Take Lynn Allen, for example. There are thousands of AutoCAD users who stay on top of their game because of Lynn. A vendor telling how to make the best use of their product in a magazine read by that products users is an example of a good vendor written article. However, I am leery of articles that suggest a solution that just happens to be what they are selling. Well meaning as they may be, I cannot bring myself to read them, much less believe them.
So before it's too late, I hope magazine editors can work to reverse the trend. Vendors are like the smart kids in the class, always with their hands up, always ready with a neat, perfect paper to turn in. It almost takes no effort for an editor to fill pages this way. It's way harder to coax an article out of a power user, many of whom don't fancy themselves as writers. And if they do labor through their Miller time scratching out an article, it's likely they'll want to be compensated for it. To top it off, the article will take more editorial scrubbing as finesse with the language has never been valued by the technically gifted. However, the end result will be a valuable rapport between real-world experts and eager readers.