Response to Alan Holub's Last Column
John Girard
jeg at ptsfa.PacBell.COM
Fri Sep 30 08:36:50 AEST 1988
> 9/29/88
>
> After reading Alan Holub's "last column" that had not been
> published, I sent a copy to Jon Erickson and asked him why I
> should continue to read DDJ. His reply was quick, and he asked
> me to post his view of the situation on the net, for equal
> representation. Obviously, there is a conflict between Alan
> and Jon. But Jon says he is leaving the door open to readers
> to comment, and that he will respond personally.
>
> Please send any feedback direct to Jon at DDJ.
>
Over the past few weeks, there's been quite a lot of discussion
about Dr. Dobb's Journal, much of it rumor, innuendo, and specu-
lation. And, as you might expect, more than a little bit of this
has been just plain misinformation. Because of problems such as
this, I devoted my Editorial in the September '88 issue of the
magazine specifically to the subject of what you can expect with
DDJ. A lot of what I'll say here about the sort of things DDJ
will be doing is discussed in more depth there. One thing I said
there bears repeating: "Believe it not, we are kind of happy to
find out that DDJ readers care enough about the magazine to raise
a stink when they feel their magazine is being threatened."
I'd also like to say that I won't be following up on this thread
here on Usenet since I don't want to get into any mud-slinging
matches; they just aren't that productive. However, I am glad to
talk with any of you who want to drop me a letter or give me a
phone call. I can be reached at (415) 366-3600 or be mailed
letters to Jon Erickson, Editor-in-Chief, DDJ, 501 Galvenston
Dr., Redwood City, CA 94063. If you send me a letter, I'll phone
you back. This will be a fairly long message; I apologize for
that but it seems that the time is warranted.
One last note before launching into a few specifics: the articles
and programs in DDJ are primarily reader-submitted. If you would
like to see an article on a specific topic, let me know, or
better yet, write it and submit it. DDJ is one of the few maga-
zines left around that still relies on *reader* submissions and
support. If the magazine isn't what you want or need, you can do
something about it by submitting an article.
1. The decision to cancel Allen Holub's monthly column was mine.
I did so because Allen would not allow us to provide his source
listings free of charge (like every other program in the maga-
zine) on our CompuServe forum or at cost to readers through our
disk distribution service. Instead he wanted to sell the source
code through his own software business. I felt his column was
becoming, in effect, a free advertisment for his business. When I
cancelled the column, I told Allen that I valued his association
with the magazine and with the C language and would like to put
him under a new contract as a contributing editor to write
feature articles and reviews. At first he said that he was in-
terested but then apparently declined.
2. The ratio of advertising to editorial pages has been going up
in favor of editorial pages since I joined DDJ. I have insisted
on that. Our November issue will be greater than 40 percent edi-
torial which is average or above average for the industry. In the
first part of this year, we were running about 50 pages of edi-
torial per issue. For the past few months, this has risen to
about 60, and next year we are planning up to 80 pages in some
months. Even if an increase in ad pages doesn't happen as expect-
ed, we will be increasing the ratio above what it is now.
3. We will continue to publish listings and those listings will
continue to be more than just quick examples. In January '89, for
instance, we are going to publish a graphics utility that is more
than 1200 lines of code. In March/April of next year, we are
planning on publishing the source code of an implementation of
Scheme. WE WILL ALWAYS PUBLISH CODE AND MAKE IT AVAILABLE TO
READERS. We'll occasionally run an article that does not have
code (one article in December won't have any), but, for me, a DDJ
article means text AND code. And more pages in the magazine means
more code.
4. The magazine is not going mass-market, low-tech. DDJ readers
want to be challenged, not coddled. We will not spoon-feed you,
we expect that you are experienced, advanced programmers who
don't need to have a simple concepts explained.
5. The technical staff at DDJ is being expanded. Kent Porter is
the senior technical editor who started in July and we are ad-
vertising for another technical editor right now. We have expand-
ed our list of contributing editors as well. Management has less
to do with the editorial content of this magazine than with any
magazine I've ever seen. They don't tell us what to publish and
in fact seem afraid to bring up the subject. I respect them for
that if nothing else. My responsibilty lies with readers, not
with advertisers or management.
6. Our columns currently consist of C programming, Structured
Programming, and Programming Paradigmns. We may include another
next year as our page count continues to increase.
7. As a courtesy to Allen, I offered him the opportunity to write
a final column. What he turned in was a scurrilous attack on me
and the magazine. He called it his "final editorial." I decided
on not publishing it (would you have?) since it didn't serve any
purpose to the reader. What you saw on Usenet was a version of
it, by the way. The acknowledgement at the end of the C column
was not my words, but those of the columnist who was simply pay-
ing tribute to Allen for his work over the years. I don't want to
get into the specifics of what we pay contributors and what we
were paying Allen. Our payment varies from $500 to about $1000
per article, depending on a number of factors such as length,
etc. I also pay bonuses to authors who go out of their way to
meet a tough deadline. I do not accept "free" articles from indi-
viduals who are associated with a company. Allen was getting paid
at the top of the scale, not the bottom and I didn't save any mo-
ney with the new columnist. I don't look at the code associated
with an article as being separate from the article. The text
tells you what the author had in mind, the code tells you what
the author is really saying. You can't have a DDJ article without
code and Allen was getting paid (handsomely) to provide a monthly
column -- this means text and code.
On another subject: Our November graphics lineup looks like this:
"Photorealism and Computer Graphics" "Perspectives on Graphical
Interfaces" "Image Compression via Image Compilation" "Dynamic
Run-Time Structures" "Mapping DOS Memory Blocks" "Inserting Ele-
ments into a BASIC Integer Array" and a review of Prolog/V (in-
cluded with Smalltalk/V). For our December operating system is-
sue, we'll be running "Writing Portable Software" "Unix vs. Unix"
"Writing OS/2 Applicationw with I/O Privledges" "Undocumented DOS
Functions" "Writing Programs for MultiFinder" "LRU Algorithms"
"Finding Functions from Inside Brief". January is neural networks
with articles on "A Neural Net for Pattern Recognition" "Under-
standing Hopfield Nets" "Neural Nets for Noise Filtering"
"Streams in Unix" "Postscript Fonts".
Again, if there are any other subjects you'd like to see covered,
write them up and send them my way. Thanks. Jon
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