A Salute To One Of Our Own
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 1/8/2004
As I write this, TWICE, and other trade and consumer publications that cover consumer electronics are experiencing our busiest time of year. From Thanksgiving through mid-January when CES winds down, with a little break between Christmas and New Year's, we are inundated with new product information. We receive e-mails, digital images, phone calls, phone messages, pages, requests for appointments before the show, during the show, etc., etc. etc. from CES exhibitors who want our undivided attention so we'll write stories about their new wares that will be on display in Las Vegas this week.
There are long hours and weekend work, writing about the industry's products during this time of year. Sometimes, the products that we write about (PCs, digital cameras, cellular phones, voice mail and the like) betray us under the strain of deadlines and we curse the Fates … or at least Bill Gates. So we trudge home after a long day and what do we do to relax? Some of us listen to CDs, or watch digital TV, or pop in a favorite DVD, or do some belated holiday shopping on the Web.
What's the moral of my story? Even if we wanted to take a break from CE products, we can't. We're surrounded! I'm not complaining. We cover the most exciting industry in the world. And besides, if you are successful at covering a specific industry, I've learned over the years you really have to love it. (Take it from me, I wasn't too thrilled, or that effective a reporter, when I covered the peanut oil industry or plastics business.)
The best journalists, no matter what they cover, should be inquisitive, curious and be able to tell their stories clearly to an audience who wants to know. The best reporters know that their first responsibility is to the reader to provide as much of the unvarnished truth as they can, before deadline.
For those of us who cover consumer electronics, there are a few other requirements to be the best. Some love the technology and dig deep to see how these products work and why one competing format or another will survive or fail. Others love to write about the financial maneuverings of the industry's corporations, whether it involves the sensitive negotiations between retailers and suppliers, battles between competitors, or internal fights between executives at the same company.
And for those of us who have been around long enough and know some of the movers and shakers on a first-name basis, a few of us love to cover the people, their careers, and how their choices have changed the industry.
The best care about the quality of the publication they work for, and don't consider the job as just another paycheck or a way of climbing the corporate latter. In the twenty-plus years I've been covering the CE industry I've been lucky enough to work with some of the best, a few of whom are current or former TWICE staffers.
Some of the best I've worked with have been curious and interested about several aspects of the CE business. One guy has been curious about every aspect of the industry. His name is Bob Gerson, founding editor-in-chief of TWICE, current editor-at-large and a proud member of the 2004 class of the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.
Over the years I've met Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto, Hall of Famers all, but I never thought I'd be working with one. In recruiting me to become editor of TWICE during the winter of 1993, Bob said after a long discussion about news and the industry, "Why don't you come over and we'll have some fun?"
Well I did come over and we did have some fun… along with the typical fireworks at deadline sometimes when the editor and editor-in-chief disagreed on how to play a story or where to run it. What I learned, in a very up-close-and-personal way, was Bob's passion for the CE industry — its technology, its people and its affect on the world around us.
For his passion for the industry and the ability to inform the industry, as well as helping to establish, along with founder and fellow Hall of Famer Richard Ekstract and publisher Marcia Grand, TWICE as the industry's top news publication, Bob richly deserves this special honor. Congratulations!
(And P.S., for those of you attending International CES this week in Vegas, have a great show.)
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