It was a long, boring, wonderful weekend.
I had no deeds to do, and no promises to keep. Other than spending time with the family and getting better acquainted with old Simon & Garfunkel songs, I pretty much had the time to myself.
It wasn’t until late Sunday that a piece of news would forever change my life.
Road & Track was getting merged/acquired/moved to Michigan. The dusting of media PR was soon avalanched by an endless variety of Facebook comments on my computer screen.
Rumor this. Vitriol that. Everyone seemed to have an opinion and an idea about the past, present and future of Road & Track. Not to mention every other car magazine that occupies the limited space in America’s ever dwindling newspaper stands.
It was strange that so many folks were capable of seeing the future of automotive print media as a dire one. Heck, didn’t Warren Buffett get rich investing in print media?
The comments struck me as nothing more than an overreaction to a publication that had struggled well before Craigslist became a household word.
I thought about the future of car magazines for more than a moment. Close to an hour’s worth of scenarios and ‘what if’s’. Then I started looking deeper into the mirror of online journalism… and I saw the exact same thing.
This is what I wrote…
For the all too few folks from the mag world who visit the confines of TTAC, you can look forward to the following sequence of events.
- Your magazine gets cut, sold, merged, acquired or sent to the hellish Siberia known as Michigan.
- Staff gets reduced further. Parent company starts getting the cold… or the corporate version of pneumonia. Magazine gets combined with automotive web sites and budgets are reduced further.
- Bored 16 year old invents a computer program that takes the writing from old magazine articles and alters them using an algorithm that relies on grammatical contexts, so that new car reviews and comparos are simply cut and pasted with mild changes.
- The ‘writer’ gets a free tank of gas and chotchkies for the next corporate event in exchange for cheerleading and rampant plagiarizing, which is OK now. Since everybody does it with the notable exception of Yahoo’s gifted editorial staff.
- Former auto journalists now perform routine automotive maintenance in Ho Chi Minh City where upwardly mobile Vietnamese drug distribution firms give out pills that offer the same high you got from reading Car and Driver. A gas station is named after Brock Yates.
- The end.
I received the usual assortment of likes. Along with one intense dislike. One auto journalist in question had thought that I had become a chicken-shit, and broken a sacred rule that I call ‘The Piper Principle‘.
The essence of this principle can be summed up in the career of long time professional wrestler, Rowdy Roddy Piper. The more of a heel he became, the more you rooted for the guy. Piper was the guy you loved to hate… and once you got sick of the ‘good guys’, you rooted for him.
When everyone else is busy booing and kicking the big guy, you start defending them.
Print journalism has been the ‘big guy’ and the ‘bad guy’ of the automotive media for nearly a decade now. My peer thought I was piling on with a mob that was engaging in nasty behavior.
All I was trying to do was point out the obvious.
There seems to be an insurmountably high bar of excellence that the monthly mags now have to pursue to remain relevant. To be blunt, you have to find the most knowledgeable and gifted literary minds in this business to make that model work. By the time the magazine heads to the enthusiast, the news is old and the ‘exclusives’ are now screenshots.
Your online presence has to be able to attract new readers, and those readers have to be given content that is rare, valuable and difficult to imitate.
There also seems to be an insurmountably low bar of mediocrity that the blogosphere can use to attract an audience these days.
Name the snark, the pop culture, or the popular Google reference, and you can pretty much enjoy the good life if you have the right backers. Or at least amuse the public, and let the real enthusiasts go off and not spend their money elsewhere.
Most publishers in this day and age, online and print, generally don’t ‘invest’ in good journalism over the long-term. It seems like the trend is to simply outsource as much talent as possible, keep the wages low, the benefits minimal, and the turnover constant.
I have seen this happen in another industry, the auto auction industry. The largest salvage auction company in the world, Copart, used to hire dozens of bid callers throughout the country to perform their sales. In 2003, they constructed their own automated chant and fired all the auctioneers. Today if you want to hear a chant at one of their auctions…you can…. online.
The chant just won’t be a human one.
A lot of you laugh at the thought of some automaton dishing out car reviews to the masses of enthusiasts. But consider how many PR blurbs now pass as car reviews in today’s newspapers and online publications. Heck, I’ve seen many industry press releases be duplicated and sent forth as actual ‘news’ in this business… under the byline of a supposed journalist.
I have faith that enthusiasts will still invest their time in the unique and the interesting. The question is whether the crux of the mainstream automotive media will remain that way.
The writing is on the wall: print media are entering their final chapter, with dwindling subscriber bases, soaring printing and distribution costs, and declining advertising revenue. The revolution of the e-reader and iPad will fundamentally change the way we get the information that had previously been available via newspaper or magazine. The Road and Track subscription will morph into an on-line tablet/smart phone mode only. That lowers overall cost and allows for unique approaches to information delivery, like embedded video clips and interactive features. I read Newsweek this way now and have come to like it better than the print version. It also insures editorial oversight and perceived value if a set of writers are retained exclusively.
The question still remains though, will people pay for it, despite the lower unit cost? For a generation used to getting everything on the internet for free, will they pony up the small but still necessary subscription price. I know that my teenage children will never get the morning paper, subscribe to a magazine, and probably never have cable TV installed. High speed internet is all they require to meet their needs.
I believe the car buff books can still survive, but they have got to change to electronic-only distribution *now* for any hope of catching this generation that will never give them a second thought in just a few years.
If they changed to electronic only, they would lose me as a customer. Reason is the only time I buy C&D or R&T is when I am bored in an airport. I spend a LOT of time bored in airports. Airports usually have lousy wifi at best, and even if I were to download it to my laptop/phone, there is that “all electronic devices must be in the off position” BS at the beginning and end of every flight. Did I mention I fly a LOT?
I knew it! I knew Newsweek still had a subscriber! That dollar was a good deal after all….
The elephant in the room is that facts cannot be copyrighted. At the end of the day journalism is not about flowery prose, it is about uncovering facts.
In the days of print journalism publishers that invested in uncovering facts got the upper hand with a one day, one week or one month scoop on their competitors. With the internet that advantage is gone.
The solution is not to provide copyright protection for facts. That is a non-starter anyway because it would violate the 1st amendment. I really do not know what the solution is.
But it is a massive problem. Without investments in uncovering facts the best we are left with is colorful reporting of things that are insignificant and already known. You may know some popular automotive journalists that do that kind of reporting.
Within the auto world I will group facts into two sets. Benign facts and malignant facts. Benign facts are the geek facts that print automotive “journalists” investigate, like 0 to 60 and skidpad numbers. The blogs that are replacing traditional automotive “journalists” are apparently so cash strapped that they cannot even put together those kinds of facts. However, eventually I think that VBOXes, etc., will become cheap enough that blogs can investigate and report that information.
Malignant facts are facts that even traditional automotive “journalists” did not have the resources or incentive to investigate. These malignant facts are mainly issues of corporate corruption and government corruption within the automotive universe. This could be X auto company dumping toxic waste in rivers, or making cars that explode upon impact. Or it could be Y government wasting billions on corrupt road projects. Or it could be Z town’s police confiscating money from motorists under seizure laws that lack due process. Without traditional news sources uncovering these facts I’m not sure who will. Sure, once these facts are discovered the blogs all repost them, but someone has to do the work to discover them.
Of course the issue of a rapidly diminishing incentive to discover facts spreads well beyond the automotive universe.
The main difference between the cities of Bricklynn and Civitown, which were discussed by Steven Lang recently, is probably that one has a well financed newspaper that investigates heavy resources into uncovering facts, and the other does not.
Politicians and executives are not, by their nature, good. It is only under the threat of muckraking journalists with strong resources that they act that way.
I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him. That being said, when was the last time you saw a record store? I don’t mean in the hippest depths of the hippest section of your hip downtown, I mean an ok record store in your suburb? Tower and Virgin died years ago. It is quite literally the buggy whip industry. I am not happy about it but for better or worse, magazines are deader than fried chicken.
Odd timing.
I recently started collecting vinyl. There a a few record stores in the Seattle/Tacoma area, but you have to make a pilgrimage to the hipster depths of downtown. Past the paid parking, coffee shops, cupcake stores (What?), and “pride” flags, you’ll find them. Overpriced, over pretentious and sort of pointless. There’s no reason to collect vinyl in the age of downloads, portable and more accessible media. I download quite a bit of music and it seems to lose its sense of occasion as just another cold file on my external harddrive. There’s just something about having that giant record. It’s a whole package. Big cover art, the smell of aged paper, the seductive valleys chasing around the record, and that wonderful clack as it slides back into its sleeve. Listening to records is an event. You have to intentionally make it happen. It requires effort. Not just the click of a file.
I also collect old video games and the pedigree illusion is in full effect there. I’m aware I’m deceiving myself, but I’m just tired of everything being so meaningless. I’m thrilled the internet has ushered in a new level of communication. It’s my sincere hope, however, that both formats, print and digital, can co-exist. I want to run to the bathroom, crack open that fresh new magazine and enjoy the smell of new print before my own duties overpower it.
A couple of years ago, a hip friend put on a record that was very important to me growing up (he didn’t know that, just happened to pick that one). He started on the B side just because he was putting some music on. I asked him to flip it (huh?) and start from side A so we could play it through. I still prefer to start albums (whu?) from track 1 and play them start to finish.
That’s another neat thing about records. You don’t just jump to the “singles”, you listen to the whole damn record most the time.
Its eventful. You crack open a nice porter, savor the taste and the music.
I just love it when I find an old car magazine at a flea market or antique mall. It is fun to read the articles and reviews, and to look at the photos, charts and ads. These old magazines are a wonderful snapshot to the past. Even if the magazines and their publishers disappear, the magazines themselves will always be available for future reference and enjoyment.
You have to wonder how much of today’s online content will be available 30, 40, 50 or more years from now? The internet may be a superior way of delivering content, but I fear this content will not have the permanence of print. I realize you can save the files you download, but with the progression of technology there is no guarantee your old downloads will be accessable on a future generation i-Gadget.
I can take or leave vinyl records, but you should see the collection of medium-format film camera gear I’ve amassed…all the wedding photographers have gone digital and there’s a lot of professional stuff available for reasonable prices–again, in places tucked away in neighborhoods like you describe, mostly, or on eBay. It’s completely inconvenient but strangely alluring to me.
My wife still has many magazine subscriptions and loves to sit down and read them. I annoy her constantly with my comments about it being a dead or dying format. Considering her iPad is always at hand, I’m surprised she hasn’t done more digitally. Actual books are almost exclusively done via Kindle or Nook apps for her.
I’m sure there are still a few holdouts hanging onto their subscriptions for this or that, but overall I’m too impatient to wait for a monthly digest when I know the information I want is already out there. Magazines don’t work so well with our instant gratification culture. I think those businesses still focused on print just refuse to see that.
“Heck, I’ve seen many industry press releases be duplicated and sent forth as actual ‘news’ in this business… under the byline of a supposed journalist.”
I see this all the time. It seems to be such a common practice nowadays in all areas of interest that I’m actually pleasantly surprised when I find something that shows real effort and considered reflection.
I see this too, the duplicated, almost word for word bylines, reviews etc, for many things, not just automotive.
It’s easy to highlight a phrase, paragraph or in some cases, whole articles, copy and past and maybe change a few items to keep it from being a literal copy. I can still tell it’s been copied from somewhere else as I often do research and find much the same things being displayed on more than one site.
Seems people are taking the easy way out with writing, instead of actually writing, many just copy and paste because it’s easy.
Re: vinyl records. Three words, Half Price Books. Some have more, some have less. Depends on what part of town you’re in. Some times they have car buff books that are worth having.
Being of the car addict variety I can say that I subscribe to and read pretty much all of the major car mags, plus some from the UK.
Online I pretty much only read TTAC. Without being overly complimentary the rest are pretty much drivel.
My 16 yo daughter is a major reader, she likes books, the feel portability what have you. My older parents with perhaps a different timeline prefer the kindle.
A print car Mag can have a wider range of articles and “thoughts” it is not a one time resading type of thing. Try CAR magazine from the Uk, or even Octane, they are a pleasure to page through over many nights. Same with hemmings, even thought the online content is more current. So print has a place, if you like to browse, go a little deeper or be exposed to something you dont ordinarily choose to read..
Me I would invest in TTAC, because it is humerous irreverant, as a good periodical should be, has entertaining industry info not found elsewhere which is compelling reading to enthusiasts,and can use some more real time on raod articles with various cars.
The problem isn’t the change in delivery systems (i.e. from physical to electronic). If that’s all it was, the Internet would be a great boon. Delivering a magazine electronically is much cheaper than printing it and mailing it and, as LeeK points out, electronic delivery offers the possibility of a richer experience than reading paper.
The problem is the business model, and getting readers to shoulder more of the cost of producing the product. The business model for nearly all print publications is that the bulk of the costs are covered by ad revenue, not by subscription revenue. Advertisers want to buy eyeballs, and that’s what newspapers and magazines were selling. Websites can sell eyeballs, too, but the process has not become as settled in (where buyer and seller understand the rules of the game), so migrating a magazine entirely to the Web, putting it behind a paywall and then trying to sell eyeballs to the same advertisers who paid for eyeballs looking at the paper product doesn’t seem to work.
So, everyone is groping around trying to reconstruct a viable business model, including pricing. For the moment, the only publication I know that seems to have gotten it right is the Wall Street Journal. WSJ print subscribers also get on-line access, and most of WSJ’s on-line content is behind a paywall. Other big names have failed in their effort to move to a subscription-based model on-line: the New York Times, for example, which now allows limited free access. “Slate” was founded as a for-pay on-line publication, but it was a completed failure. Now, I believe, it’s entirely free.
As far as paying for quality, I don’t see any reason why an on-line subscriber is willing to pay less for quality than a paper subscriber. The fact is, for all of the big publications, it was the advertiser shouldering most of the cost. There have always been small paper publications that were supported primarily by subscriptions, often run as kind of a hobby by their publishers: Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and the like. Most of these publications rely on guest authors who, I think, publish in these outlets more for the prestige value than for the money. Many of these authors are academics, associated with think tanks or with colleges and universities.
I think the biggest difficulty for on-line publishers, especially ones that are ad-driven and supported by “unique page views,” is the need for continuously refreshed content. Print publications had a cycle — daily, weekly, monthly — that allowed them to better match their staff resources with their output. Now, a website that updates only weekly would go absolutely nowhere.
It seems to me that the only way to do this is to rely on a lot of freelance people to supply material, with a small staff to solicit contributions and edit them.
Of course I think about these things a lot – print vs. online, old guys vs. young blood. It’s not hard to come to the same conclusion that you have, that we need to stick together. Good, impartial, entertaining and relevant work will always be valuable. It might not make us rich, but if we work hard we may be able to make a living. If we can’t make a living, we’ll likely have fun trying!
Biggest problem I see with Car blogs/websites is they get superficial and just show new car or spy pics, and then all the fanatics post negative snarky comments, each trying to one up each other.
pfft it’s not just car news that is releasing press releases. Any industry news type are doing from audio/video equipment to new computer/electronic devices. Hell there is probably a website devoted to cookware that regurgitates press releases.