Welcome to the very last issue of Tech Watch as we have come to know it—a professionally produced, packaged document suitable for print, containing the news of a fortnight. With a lifelong love of print and typography, we tried to create as attractive a piece as we humanly knew how.
Long after the fires of the newspaper wars have died down, and the Internet’s violent mugging of the technical press, we’ve been amazed that we’ve survived with a publication of this sort. Truthfully, we were sort of afraid to mess with a format that seemed to be working no matter how mysteriously.
We knew it couldn’t last, and all along we have been threatening to fully move into the 2Ist century and now we think we have done it by creating an all new web site full of information we’ve written, collected, compiled, and analyzed for our subscribers. We will also have much more free content. And we hope to entertain educate with our opinionated but straightforward style.
There is much that we will miss. There is a lot to be said for being able to group stories together and highlight trends, or call out contradictions in a single issue. But we’re hoping to open up much more content for all visitors coming to the site with links, categories, searches, and archives.
The world moves on and arguably we’ve been slow to catch up. As usual with humans, we were willing to keep plugging along until the pain simply got too severe. The cycle of writing, editing. correcting, laying out, editing again and finally posting is bad enough on its own, but there’s always more work piling up and new information, jobs, new reports to be dealt with. Honestly, I have no idea how we dragged along this far. We’ve been doing this for the last 18 years, if you just count the days of JPR and forget the earlier incarnations, the Peddie Report and the PCGR which were being published while I was in grade school (or thereabouts).
JPR has had the help of two brilliant managing editors, artists / editors: Marilyn Novell, who created the original design for Tech Watch and George Walsh, who valiantly stepped in and picked up the reins while Marilyn went to graduate school. Both worked incredibly hard to get this thing published and looking good. Both probably never ever want to see a copy of InDesign on their desktops again.
I now know how hard they worked because as we began the unexpectedly long march to digital I started doing it myself, which goes a long way towards explaining errors and inconsistency. It has taken a very very long time to get this done. Apparently what wanted to do was a lot harder than we realized.
I’m thinking I might do a one-woman show to describe the incredible hurdles we faced along the way. Instead, one of these days I’ll buy you a beer and we can talk about it. I will tell you that it involves Donald Trump and Russians.
The site is now up. Please visit and wander around. There are some lingering problems. By all means let us know any you encounter. We’re in the whacka- mole stage, but we’re making progress. When it’s up and running like it’s supposed to be, there will be fresh content up on the site every day. Now that we won’t be writing a whole issue every other week, we’ll be able to do better research and have more in-depth stories. My very favorite feature is the ability to save stories, which you’ll be able to access through your own personal Dashboard. You can look at all the stories in a category, tagged stories, stories about a product, and so on. In this way, we think Tech watch will be a valuable resource for companies compiling their own competitive research as they’re developing new products and looking for new markets.
Companies who have bought reports will be able to access their content on the site and even see or download their spreadsheets for those reports that provide that information. All that will also be accessible through the Dashboard.
So give a whirl and let us know when the ride gets wobbly—we’ll fix it. It’s gonna be great!