Control Engineering Mag to cease publication and website.

Got the following

Our parent company, Reed Elsevier, announced in July of 2009 its intentions to substantially exit its Reed Business Information U.S. publishing business, while retaining other businesses. Over the past several months, multiple publishing brands have been divested. On April 16, 2010, we announced the closure of the remaining publishing brands and their associated products and services. Consequently, the April 2010 issue was the final issue of Control Engineering Magazine and our web sites will cease operating as of April 30, 2010.

We are proud of the role we have played in informing our industry over the years and it has been our pleasure to serve you.

Regards,

The Staff of Control Engineering Magazine

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Plant Engineering Magazine is also affected.

That is too bad. Of the many useless trade rags out there, IMO Control Engineering was one of the few that was actually informative.

On the upside, maybe the amount of spam I get from Reed will decrease. (one can hope )


In an unfortunate irony, the cover story of the last issue published by the people who worked at Control Engineering asks the question, "How Is Your Career Looking?"

I just got the same email from them. Control Engineering was pretty much the only industry magazine that I still read. I guess now I will read none...



-Eric

I am on the same page with Eric.

I have found the following publication quite useful ...

http://www.instrumentation.co.za/

I must get like 50 different pubs but i will miss this one it was pretty good. Some are just flip through and throw away and some help just to keep up with new products coming out. They are good for killing time between each class.

Im like this one a lot also http://www.automationworld.com/

and EE Times http://www.eetimes.com/ as well as ec&m http://ecmweb.com/

Control Engineer was one of the few I would bother to look at.

I would usually skim it and stop to read only if there was something that really interested me. I will not miss it a probably wouldn't have noticed that it was missing.

It would be interesting to know why it is closing. I can understand that advertising has been cut back as companies try to cut costs. There is competition between the magazines for advertisers and the advertisers are looking at the circulation numbers. Some of the circulation numbers are meaningless because magazines send copies to people that don't read them. I know we look at the response to our adds and some magazines are better than others.

Personally I think the internet and the ability to do advertising on the internet for 'almost free' is killing magazines and trade shows.

I could ask what do you think the readers would like to see in the magazines to make them want to buy it but I doubt anyone pays for these magazines anymore. The better question is would would make the advertisers want to advertise and pay more and I don't think there is an answer.

Control Engineering went too "elaborate"

It looks like Reed is just looking to get out of the automation trade magazine business. Even if CE had a large readership I don't know that it would have survived.

That being said, I think CE started sliding away from what most of us do on a day to day basis. There are only so many watershed SCADA overhauls and brewery upgrades I can read about before I start to ask how this related to me.

I also wasn't a big fan of their panels. I could typically guess the responses to the questions just based on the company the panel member was from. These were often less information and more advertising.

Finally I don't often have the time to invest in the 10-page novels that many of the articles became. I started saving CE for my time on aircraft.

Keith

Costs could be reduced by going just digital but the digital has to be in a format that is easy to make, maintain,archive and read.

I hate all these different flash magazine views jsu so you have the pretty page flip. Do them in pdf of some other standard foremat but pdf would be great. When most of the magazines try digital they try to reinvent the wheel. PDF would be easy to use on computers,ebook readers and such and would be great for archiving good articles for future use.

To me it is really stupid to be doing buisness in 2010 and just offering paper formats.

Many product websites you go to have app guides and product info if you give your info and they mail to you. Fine have that as an option but have direct open format download available also.

many of the free magazines would do better if they went straight digital in open format. it is pretty cheap to send links to the latest issue it is another to mail paper magazines to people who don't read them in this market.

Keith

I think you nailed it. I like ec&m because it is practical and 90% of the article content i can use now of will be handy to know later. It is down to earth to the point and is technical as it needs to be. I think it has a good mix.

CE should have had articles on rockwell and siemens networks and how they work. Crafty programming examples. Robotics simple and some indepth articles on drives.Scada,etc.

Gotta keep it fresh,valuable. Gotta mix it up.

They may be closing at the end of the month but they are still churning out weekly news emails as I received one this morning. Again, not so much news but just advertisement of products.

kamenges said:

I started saving CE for my time on aircraft.

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I do the same thing I grab a few issues of various trade rags and stuff them in a side pocket of my carry on and then ditch them in the nearest trash can when de-planing. When I find something of interest I rip it out for later reference rather than carry the whole thing around. I sometimes wondered how many issues of CE or PE or Design News, etc. got thrown away in far away airports every day.

Originally posted by Alaric:

...and then ditch them in the nearest trash can when de-planing.

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I usually leave mine in the seat pocket when I go. I figure, even if the next person doesn't know what they are reading, it has GOT to be better than reading the airline magazine for the 17^th time.

Keith

They're back. [\poltregeist]

It looks like Control Engineering will resume publication in June.

I just saw that CFC Media has acquired Control Engineering and Plant Engineering from Reed. Many of the original staff will be part of the new publishing teams - good news for them.

I'll withhold judgement until I see the results, hopefully it will continue to be an interesting as well as useful source of information.

http://cfemedia.gcnpublishing.com/index.php?id=559

kamenges said:

I usually leave mine in the seat pocket when I go. I figure, even if the next person doesn't know what they are reading, it has GOT to be better than reading the airline magazine for the 17^th time.

Keith

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I didtch mine in the plane also. Infact a couple of times I have given them to other people on the plane. Those flights to europe are REAL LONGGGGGGGGGGG............

It looks like this publication will be back:

http://cfemedia.gcnpublishing.com/index.php?id=559