Light Reading Acquires Boardwatch Magazine

Posted on January 3, 2003

Light Reading, a telecommunications technology resource, announced that it has purchased Boardwatch magazine from Penton Media. Light Reading also acquired Penton's Boardwatch and ISPworld websites and its directory of Internet service providers.

"This is a huge day for Light Reading. Integrating Boardwatch's 50,000 service provider readers with our existing carrier audience gives Light Reading the largest service provider audience of any publication in the world," said Stephen Saunders, president and CEO of Light Reading. "We now reach over 100,000 service providers in the U.S., Asia, and Europe."

The Boardwatch magazine will be moved online, like all of Light Reading's publications. The resulting savings on printing and distribution costs will be reinvested into the magazine's editorial coverage -- which will be expanded to include analysis of both the economics of service provider networks and the technology installed in them.

"Boardwatch will focus on the issues that service providers are concerned with -- not just technology and the business case for deploying it, but also everything to do with the information supply chain that links content providers to end users," said Peter Heywood, cofounder of Light Reading.

The Boardwatch website will also undergo a sweeping redesign -- including the incorporation of an existing part of the Light Reading Website: the Service Provider Circle, a portal that brings together information of interest to carriers from third-party sources.

Light Reading launched in February 2000. Its website provides analysis of telco networking developments. Light Reading says it has been profitable from its inception and that its lightreading.com website receives 850,000 visitors each month. Light Reading also publishes byteandswitch.com, which covers storage networking issues, and unstrung.com, a site providing analysis of the wireless industry.