STH has a new Managing Editor. Ryan Smith, who previously served as Editor-in-Chief at AnandTech for a decade, is stepping into this new role to help our team. I wanted to do a quick post to welcome Ryan, and also answer some questions our readers might have.
Welcoming Ryan Smith as STH’s New Managing Editor
Over the past year, you may have seen Ryan on STH quite a few times, starting with the AMD CES 2025 Keynote coverage. Ryan took over pieces that I usually do, and my instructions were simple. I just told Ryan to do what he thought was best. That may sound trivially logical or inconsequential, but it was a big sign. I actually think Ryan knows how to cover a lot of the industry better than I do, and I probably learned a lot from Ryan’s coverage at AnandTech over the years.
Here is a bit of the behind-the-scenes. If you have been following our STH Letter from the Editor series, I have been discussing it regularly for some time. To be transparent, running the STH YouTube could be its own job now. We also have the growing Axautik Group newsletter, the STHLabs channel, and more. Add all of that running STH, and it is just chaos. I have been stuck in a role that needed to change, not just expand. Since STH is something I have been working on since 2009, it is challenging to give up some of those responsibilities.
Fighting against the inertia of maintaining the status quo meant I needed to find someone who I trust can carry the torch. That is when I realized that I trust Ryan to do the pieces I normally would do, and he has the experience to run a publication.
I am not departing STH, not even close. In the short term, I have asked Ryan to help with three urgent tasks:
- First, to continue doing some of the keynote coverage, where it is helpful to have Ryan covering events.
- Second, to help define and manage our schedule. Given how many folks we have touching articles at various phases, and how often things get pushed, we have been operating in a triage mode of just answering the question, “What is the best thing we can publish each day?” Having someone else manage the STH publishing schedule takes a load off of me.
- Third, we need help getting our production across the finish line. Ryan and I just looked at a review where the photos were taken and edited in late September, screenshots were taken as the device was used, and yet we went two months where the review just sat. Right now, we have an excellent process for doing photography and B-roll, our video editing is actually getting better, which you will see soon, our testing is getting done, but the writing is lagging. Two years ago, I could backstop that, but I do not have the bandwidth to do so at this point.
Final Words
My ask of the STH community is that you welcome Ryan. He has been doing this for a long time, and he will do a great job. To be frank with everyone, and I told Ryan this, we will hit a few bumps over the next few weeks/ months as we get accustomed to a new way of working. I hope that by this time next year, things will be running more smoothly and I will no longer be the bottleneck.
Thank you for the warm welcome, Patrick!
I’ve had the privilege of knowing Patrick for well over a decade at this point, watching the site grow from a tiny operation to what it is today. And Patrick has been able to bring a unique style in a crowded field that has led to STH publishing some really great pieces over the years. So when Patrick called me up and told me that he needed an experienced hand to help manage the site and to free him up to work on some bigger projects, I jumped that the opportunity to help.
As STH’s managing editor, I should note that this is still first and foremost Patrick’s site, so I’m not looking to bring any immediate changes to the content it publishes. While I imagine I’ll leave some kind of mark in time, for now my focus is on helping keep Patrick’s team (and the big man himself) laser-focused on projects. Having seen Patrick’s proverbial drawing board, there’s no shortage of projects in the works at STH, so I’ll be helping the team bring more of those projects to life – and with at least a modicum more sanity for everyone along the way.
Working for STH is also a fresh challenge for me. Coming from AnandTech where the bulk of my focus was on consumer hardware, STH’s narrower enterprise/IT focus is definitely going to be a change. Less GeForce and more Graviton, I suppose. And enterprise hardware testing is quite different, as well. But then if the job wasn’t going to offer a challenge, I probably wouldn’t have taken it to begin with. So it’s a chance for me to grow while contributing to the great work that STH puts out.
I know a lot of STH readers were also AnandTech readers for a time, so a lot of you are probably familiar with me to some degree. And if not, then hello to you! I trust you’ll enjoy what Patrick and the rest of the team are putting together over the coming weeks and months – and I hope you’re ready for more of it than ever before.
Welcome RS. I can’t wait to read your articles again
Welcome Ryan! I read Anandtech since 1997 until it closed so looking forward to your contributions here. I’m afraid it might be somewhat of an uphill battle if you hope to increase data center community engagement. I noticed few comments to most articles here at STH. To increase community involvement, you would need to reach out to data center users and builders but due to the monstrous amount of competition, I feel like many of these users and builders are under NDAs and strict silence that they would fear being sued out of existence if they left even the slightest bit of insight into the data center world in the STH comments section. I hope I’m wrong and we can start to hear more from the community.
As a long term reader of both Anandtech and STH, I am really happy to hear this news!
Congratulations to Ryan on the new job and congratulations to Patrick on the excellent hiring choice!
Now if you could just get Andrei F. to do a couple of guest pieces every now and then, it would be perfect.
Nice! Ryan knows what he’s doing, and will hopefully let Patrick stay sane. :-)
I got the impression that Patrick was underwater, so it’s great he’s now gotten someone that we’ve all been reading for decades(?) to help.
So Ryan, what are you reviewing first?
Ryan Smith, one of the AnandTech’s legends, is back. This is beyond exciting! Best of luck, Ryan!!
The dream came true! STH == AnandTech but for servers :)
I too started reading Anandtech back in the Celeron and K6-2 days, welcome Ryan, happy to read and see what you come up with!