“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
– Douglas Adams

Traveling China’s Silicon Road

In the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to wander across the United States to live and work, from Alpena, MI, to Austin, TX, from Cincinnati, OH to Santa Rosa, CA, among others. I’ve also gotten to traipse across the globe several times, to Japan and here and there in Europe. But those travels all paled in comparison to spending a month traipsing across China, east west, north and south.

The GPS/Geospatial Years

Early in this decade, during my stint at Electronic News, I became an unwitting character in the drama that is the news business today: laid off as my print publication folded after decades of history, only to be offered the chance to reinvent myself as an online journalist. Letting my faculty adviser back in college talk me out of minoring in computer science back suddenly seemed like a really dumbass move (thanks Mr. Bugeja). Even though I hadn’t done any coding since high school, suddenly I was hip-deep in HTML and wrestling with nascent content management systems — stuff they never taught us in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at O.U. (bet they do now).

Sink or swim: these days I find myself worrying more often pondering PHP syntax and MySQL databases than about who, what, when, where, and why. Luckily, once a nerd, always a nerd; the geek really shall inherit the earth, or at least the virtual one.

At GPS World and Geospatial Solutions I mostly did what I’ve come to think of as “hit and run” journalism: rewrite press releases or compose short stories quickly for a website and daily e-mail newsletter. Basically a glorified stringer producing spot news. Not that there is anything wrong with that; it serves a need. But occasionally I had the chance to sink my teeth into a topic, and sometimes it was actually rather interesting. To wit:

Can High-Resolution Imagery Resolve the Ararat Mystery?
Yeah, that’s right, I got to write a story about how geospatial technology is being applied in the search for Noah’s Ark. And I got to talk to a veteran of NASA’s Apollo program, to boot — sometimes my job is pretty cool.

GIS Proves Invaluable to Oil Spill Preparedness
Not as fascinating as ancient biblical myth, perhaps, but using satellite imagery and analysis to prevent and clean up oil spills and similar environmental problems proves fairly interesting.

Then there is the blogging. It’s rather ironic that journalism has come full circle — the pamphleteers of the 18-century revolutions are akin to today’s bloggers. Everything comes around again. GPS World would sometimes turn me loose from the daily newsletter grind to blog at a tradeshows and technical symposia. Not the stuff of the French Revolution, but I tried to keep it newsworthy while entertaining:

ION 2007 News Coverage — Jeff Chappell

ION 2008 News Coverage — Jeff Chappell

Running Rampant on the Op/Ed Page

I have to admit, writing editorials and columns has been one of the most enjoyable parts of my journalism career over the years. My first appearance on an editorial page, for the Athens News many years ago, concerned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ breakfast cereal, marketing to children, and “evil corporate boogerheads.” It kind of set the tone for the rest of my editorial page endeavors.

Following is a list of columns written for Electronic News over the years. These are not all of the columns, just some of the best, in my humble opinion. The ones with an * next to them are the ones written during the years when I was under investigation by the FBI and Major League Baseball for steroid use. Actually, this just denotes my personal favorites.

If you only read one of these, read this one. This column is the end result of what happens when journalism majors are allowed to minor in English during college; my apologies to the Bard, William Shakespeare.

Google Gets Googled, Cows Get Cow Chips Sept. 7, 2005*

Log on and Kill Your TV Aug. 3, 2005

Vive La Revolución … Or Not June 29, 2005

Hark, Robin! It’s the Bat DAC! May 11, 2005*

A Layoff Here, A Job Cut There April 20, 2005

Saying Good-Bye to One of Our Own March 23, 2005*

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money Feb. 9, 2005*

God Bless the Gadgets, Every One Dec. 8, 2004

Rat Brain Flies Plane Nov. 17, 2004*

Alas! Poor Margin! I Knew Him, Horatio Oct. 13, 2004*

Much Ado About SARS May 14, 2003

Blasphemy Runs Over Dogma May 7, 2003*

Spare Us the Smart Fridge April 22, 2002

Put Up or Shut Up April 1, 2002

Tchotchke: The Point Is? Nov. 20, 2000

Robust Solution Needed Oct. 2, 2000*

Alphabet Soup in a FOUP Sept. 4, 2000

‘Twas the Night Before Semicon July 24, 2000*

But Soft! What Nasdaq Through Yonder Chasm Drops? May 29, 2000*

E-Commerce? Try E-Madness April 24, 2000

Links to Bygone Editorial Copy: the E-News Years

“There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write. Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.”
— Henry R Luce, on recruiting staff for Fortune

Here’s stuff from my years at Electronic News, both the print and online versions. Immediately below is an example of a typical E-News front page, replete with drop-dead sexy cover model.

Change Those SOX and Expense Those Options – Dec. 22, 2005
Stock options were a sore subject for business even before the widespread evidence of backdating and ensuing drama that ensued in the financial world in 2006. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), enacted in 2002 in the wake of several major accounting scandals among publicly held companies, changed the way all public companies did business, and the chip industry was no exception.

Intel/Micron/Apple Deal Spawns Stock Sell-off – Nov. 22, 2005
The circle of life: semiconductor technology begat the Internet; the Internet begat instant communication; instant communication begat day trading; day trading begat headaches for chip industry executives; the craziness of it all begat amused editors.

And the August Merger Plot Thickens … – Feb. 9, 2005
… So What’s All the August Fuss About? – Feb. 9, 2005
Tug-o-war is a fun game, particularly when it involves cutting-edge technology, millions of dollars and lawyers. Lots of lawyers.

Gazing into the Magic 8-Ball – Dec. 21, 2004
When forecasting the near-term future of business cycles in the semiconductor industry, the answer is almost always “outlook cloudy; try again later.” But sometimes you can manage to get a relatively clear picture …

Mattson Sheds Wet Clean Business – February 12, 2003
“The best laid plans o’ mice and men”—and chip industry executives—often went awry and left “naught but grief an’ pain/For promised joy” in the wake of the tech bust of 2001 (apologies to Robert Burns).

Downturn Dilemma – Dec. 2, 2002
My swan song story for the final print edition of Electronic News. This was one of my favorite stories that I did for E-News, as it tackled the controversial subject of outsourcing and examined it from a perspective that was rarely considered inside the chip industry.

Outsourcing Has Its Dark Side – Nov. 11, 2002
The company visit and interviews that generated this story had originally concerned a product introduction, but as is often the case, there was a larger story waiting to be told. This story in fact provided the impetus for the “Downturn Dilemma” story linked above.

Qualifying Technology – Oct. 14, 2002

Open Architecture vs. Open Standard – Oct. 14, 2002

Can Chips Make You a Better Person? – Oct 14, 2002
I had to include this triumvirate of stories here, not so much because I’m proud of their
substance, but because they contain three different datelines, from France, Belgium and the United States, all within the same weekly issue. How cool—not to mention uncommon—is that? These were some of the fruits of a month-long working vacation in Europe that year.

E-Waste: A Growing Problem – March 11, 2002

Recycling Europa – March 18, 2002

Recycling America – March 25, 2002
This was a three-part series looking at how the tech industry and governments are wrestling with the growing problem of electronics waste. The drive to produce better and cheaper consumer products is in turn producing mounds of outdated electronics. This has prompted a move to develop more environmentally friendly electronics, a move that has proved controversial and technically challenging.

Crossing the Cultural Divide, Part One – Jan. 8, 2001

Crossing the Cultural Divide, Part Two – Jan. 15, 2001
While on my first trip to Japan, I seized the opportunity to talk with
Japanese executives from two top semiconductor capital equipment companies. I wanted to discuss the difference in culture and business practices between the United States and Japan, and how this affects the way Japanese companies and executives do business outside of Japan. It proved interesting, to say the least.

Japan, Inc. Rethinks Its Semi Strategy – Dec. 10, 2001
Japan’s economic woes in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, combined with the increasingly global nature of the chip industry, forced changes to its business practices, many of which were deeply rooted in its culture. This is a theme I explored on more than one occasion while in Japan, as you can see below.

Is the Sky Falling? – Aug. 7, 2000
The semiconductor industry is very cyclical, and investors know this. What no one has
figured out is when the cycles will start and stop. Of course that doesn’t keep
investors, analysts and everyone else from trying. This story is wonderfully ironic in hindsight; as anyone in the tech industry knows, particularly those involved in Internet start-ups at the time, a few months after this story appeared it was abundantly clear that the sky was indeed falling on Silicon Valley, and falling hard.

“A 19th century Irish immigrant named O’Reilly called the newspaper ‘a biography of something greater than a man. It is the biography of a day. It is a photograph, of twenty four hours’ length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year’s newspapers – which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written—and we use them to light the fire.’”
— Adair Lara, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle