After serving two tours of duty at Horizon House Publications-one as Editor in Chief of the TelecomEngine website and earlier as both Staff and Senior Editor of Telecommunications Magazine--I just joined the cast of FierceTelecom as senior editor this week on Monday, July 6.
July 6th has special significance for me: it was the same date I started my journey in the telecom industry as a junior editor covering optical and enterprise networking for Information Gatekeepers.
Obviously, a lot has changed in our industry since 1998. Back then, the big news was SBC's (now AT&T) impending acquisition of Ameritech and Bell Atlantic's (now Verizon) impending acquisition of the former GTE. Of course, there was an explosion of new CLECs, a product of the FCC's landmark 1996 Telecom Act, and the .com.
While we now take it for granted that you can get your news in any form on the web or in an e-mail-based newsletter format, in 1998 the idea still in its infancy.
Interestingly enough, one of the first tasks my early mentor Dr. Paul Polishuk-a Lincoln Labs physicist who served as Deputy Director of the Office of Telecommunications, US Department of Commerce, during the Nixon Administration-was to create a newsletter that effectively summarized the major news events every day in the telecommunications industry. After distributing it internally as part of my telecom education process, I worked with our small IT shop to launch what eventually became the ‘Today in Telecom' e-mail news service.
I think FierceTelecom and the other web-based properties of the FierceMarkets parent embody the notion of leveraging the utility of the web to deliver news and information in an up-to-the-minute innovative fashion.
As I sharpen my pencil and get down to work, I wanted to take a brief moment and address, you, the reader and the great community of friends and colleagues that I have gotten to know over the past decade. And while I am in the process of infusing new elements into the FierceTelecom site, including a cadre of new columnists and other features, I want to tell you that I can't do this alone, so I encourage you to come to me with your questions and ideas. I look forward to hearing from you.
- Sean