If I Were Editor...

I've just finished my flip through the weeklies -- eWeek, InformationWeek, InfoWorld -- and the not-quite-weekly CIO. And I have to say, if I were the chief editor for those magazines, I'd start paying more attention to a topic they all cover but don't appear to understand: the internationalization of technology.

Magazines have always outsourced. I mean, that's what hiring freelancers is all about -- getting somebody not in your employ to do work for you. And I don't know any publishing company that handles its own customer service or fulfillment anymore let alone the printing.

Yet, that's as far as it goes -- customer service.

These business-of-tech books all have something in common: Not a one has a single columnist or regular contributor who doesn't live in the United States! A couple -- eWeek and InfoWorld -- are dominated by middle-aged American white men. (And there's nary a woman writing in their pages. InformationWeek used to have Stephanie Stahl in its pages almost every week, but she's been shuttled to an executive editor post that never seems to show up in the printed version of the magazine anymore. But I digress.)

Technology is happening these days in places besides Silicon Valley and Boston. And, in fact, those other geographic locations are stoking the business behind the technology. Yet, aside from big articles where the American writers visit a foreign land to report on what they see there, nobody offers an India or China perspective as a regular part of its coverage.

What prevents these big-budgeted magazines from hiring reporters in Bangalore and Beijing to keep us up to date with trends and news from their parts of the world on a daily and weekly basis?

If I were chief editor for one of those publications, my pages, my coverage, would reflect important insights and information from the whole world of technology, not just the part I can see outside the window of my corner office.