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Matthew DeBord’s, Apple Will Change Cars posting at The Big Money web site foresees Apple’s IPAD as the forerunner of a touch screen dashboard, eliminating all the instrumentation except the odometer. For auto journalists he believes, “it could be a huge deal for the so-called “buff books,” magazine titles such as Car and Driver, Road & Track, Motor Trend, etc., because it will allow these glossies to program more dynamic content, including video, and still showcase cars with vivid photography in a format unbound from the desktop and not mixed up with the full-blown computing capabilities of most laptops.”

Wired editor Chris Anderson, interviewed by OnLine Media, said, “If you look at the Tablet in particular, the prototypes we are working on now are applications of traditional magazine-making techniques to a much more efficient distribution platform, and much more powerful presentation platform, with all kinds of multimedia aspects to it. It is designed to leverage our existing skills. You know — photography, design, editing, and control of the experience – the packaging of the ideas. These are skills we believe transcend paper, and the Tablet is the first opportunity we’ve had to show that.”

The Road Ahead:February 2010
Photo By: Artiom Chernyshevich

That opportunity means added impact and that is where the future lies for Online Spin columnist Joe Marchese: “ ‘Scale’ is not necessarily as important as it once was. Advertisers coming from a world where ‘reach and frequency’ was a success metric need to realize that in this new world scale is out and impact is in.” In other words, buying billions of impressions online — where click-throughs amount to no more than a ’rounding error’ and the number of people who recall seeing the ad, let alone remembering the message in the ad, can hardly be measured on a logarithmic scale — is not impactful.”

Emotion is the key according to a new study by Innerscope, as reported by Karl Greenberg in Media Post. He says: “The firm found that while consumers’ overall emotional engagement with car and truck ads dropped from 2008 to 2009, some ads engaged consumers at high levels across brands and classes. And those ads had specific characteristics that were missing from ads with low engagement scores.”  What Innerscope CEO Carl Marci tells Greenberg about ads is relevant to auto writing and reporting, “Seventy-five percent of behavior, including engagement, is driven by subconscious responses. We are measuring unconscious emotional response to auto ad stimuli, and if the ads aren’t relevant, you aren’t going to be engaged.”

Still another informed look at web communications is offered by Craig Newmark, founder of CraigsList. From his piece in The Huffington Post: “Trust is the new black, as I like to say. The great opportunity for news organizations is to constructively demonstrate trustworthy reporting, and to visibly do so. News curation, that is, selecting what’s news and should be visible, that’s an equally big deal. …The successful news organizations of the future will pursue models for news curation/selection which is a hybrid of professional editing and collaboration among talented consumers.”

Helping readers weigh the output of crowd-sourced input is a new product from a start-up firm, Jodange, reported by Steve Smith in Media Post. “Thoughts, feelings and sentiments coming off the Web — that is what the technology is about,” says (Jodange) co-founder Larry Levin. The technology uses linguistic analysis to extract opinions from text, identify the sentiments expressed, the opinion holder and the topic. When combined together they produce, for example, the ‘Top of Mind Recovery Pulse’ which analyzes everything from news articles to blog posts and even Twitter tweets to surface and quantify attitudes.”

Autowriters.com Autowriters Spotlight: Paul Borden
Paul Borden

The newly elected president of the Southern Auto Media Association, Paul Borden, got a late start in auto writing. And because his dad, an insurance salesman, didn’t welcome the risks that came with a teenage driver, Borden didn’t bring the lifelong passion or gear head’s knowledge to the craft when he did start writing about cars. It was his considerable journalism experience that earned him a shot. He’s found it fascinating and says if he knew starting out what he knows now he would have had a tough time choosing between auto and sports writing, the latter his forte for years.

Fortunately for him and his readers he doesn’t have to. In addition to writing car reviews for the monthly Miami Times and two web sites, he covers home games of the Miami Hurricanes’ football and basketball teams. He reports on the latter for the online news service, SportsXchange. That, of course, is deadline writing, something he became used to while writing first for his Indiana hometown paper, the Vincennes Sun-Commercial followed by the Bloomington, Ind. Herald-Tribune where he was assistant sports editor. His career was interrupted by four plus years active duty as a Naval Reserve officer. He returned to sports writing after his military service, working at the Louisville Courier-Journal and later, as sports editor for daily newspapers in Jackson, Miss. and Little Rock, Ark.

Moving to the copy desk at the Miami Herald, he became a friend of the late Terry Jackson, who had spent most of his newspaper career as an auto writer. That led to an invitation from Jackson to join him 10 years ago at the then promising Auto World Magazine being launched by AMI. When Borden acknowledged he had no auto writing background except for some auto races he had covered, Jackson assured him it was his writing and editing experience that made him valuable. Others would handle the tech-specs side. Borden finds that works for him long after the magazine’s demise. “I take a journalist approach to auto writing and look at cars the way consumers do. ‘How does it feel?’ ‘How’s the vision?’ I do include 0 to 60 because that’s important for entering freeways.” Borden expresses some frustration with the technology in new cars he reviews. “Some of them you have to have a PhD to change radio stations.” And, he has an on-going campaign to get Mercedes-Benz to change its cruise control lever so he doesn’t hit it when he goes for the turn signal. Otherwise, he is sanguine about the future of auto writing, believing niche writers in general and smaller localized publications will fare best over time.

He helped found SAMA three years ago and feels good about its growth. It has attracted many members who serve Caribbean and South American markets as well as members serving consumers in South Florida and beyond. The association sponsors an annual “Rides n Smiles” event at Homestead-Miami Speedway that benefits Baptist Hospital and in addition to its a monthly luncheon programs, holds a special breakfast/lunch to kick-off the South Florida International Auto Show. To this, Borden hopes to have a “Green Vehicle” event in the spring.

Depending upon who is paying for a survey and who is interpreting it, a silver lining is always possible. For example:

MediaPost reports that a recently released Scarborough USA Study of the Integrated Newspaper Audience – those who actually read a newspaper in print or online – revealed that 74% of all U.S. adults(171 million persons) read a newspaper during the week surveyed. The trade newsletter quoted backhanded praise of the results from Scarborough vice president Gary Meo, “ …given the fragmentation of media choices, print newspapers are holding on to their audiences relatively well.”  John F. Sturm, president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, was quoted with this unlikely take from the Scarborough findings “…this data also provides further evidence that newspapers reach a highly educated, affluent audience.”

Another Media Post summarized an Adweek Media/Harris survey of newspaper readership, “the era of Americans reading a daily newspaper every day is coming to an end.” Only two in five Americans do so. Seven in ten read a newspaper once a week and 81% once a month. Ten percent never read a newspaper. That number jumps to 17 percent in the 18 to 34 age group while the number who read a newspaper every day drops to less than 25 percent.

MediaPost also reported that a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism revealed that 95% of what the public learns is “still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media, primarily newspapers.”

And, a Center for Media Research report of another AdweekMedia/Harris poll shows that newspapers and magazines get the most votes of any medium when it comes to where they can find the best bargains. Yet, the Outsell News Users research predicts steep drops in newspaper circulation according to another Center for Media research brief. The brief also notes that Google drives some readers to newspapers but 44% of Google News visitors scan headlines without accessing a newspaper site. Read the rest of this entry »

A web-based, 3-d interactive walk-through tour of the 2010 Chicago Auto Show is scheduled to go live February 12 at www.chicagoautoshow.com. In addition to providing fluid navigation through the mammoth show, the web walk integrates clickable icons to provide embedded video, audio high resolution images and links to more information. . . . The show also earns kudos for sponsoring a New Media Conference for attending journalists and PR persons.

In a column for the Washington Post, Warren Brown opines that because “old school automotive journalism emphasizes speed, handling, and something called fun-to-drive” many of its members are surprised by Hyundai Motors climb from a laughable entry to great sales success. That’s because, he writes, “old-school automotive journalism doesn’t reflect everyday-world realities. Most automotive consumers, especially those in need of family transportation, look primarily for affordability, safety, fuel economy, comfort and reliability.”

The unique Mana La Solar Car has been donated to the Petersen Automotive Museum by John Paul Mitchell Systems (hair products). It was built by John Paul DeJoria and Paul Mitchell for the 1988 world solar challenge.

Mana La Solor Car

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Dan Neil has moved from Los Angeles to North Carolina and from the Los Angeles Times to The Wall Street Journal where his car column will resume in the Spring. It is rumored, he will be seen on Fox News TV, presumably commenting on cars. . . . Doug Stokes left Gale Banks Engineering where he beat the publicity drums non-stop for two and 1/2 years. He prefers not to call it freelance, suggesting, “reasonablelance” or “inexspensivelance“, but he is hanging out his shingle for PR, marketing, reputation management and consulting assignments and can be emailed at: stokescommunications@earthlink.net or telephoned at: 626-391-3772.

John Stoll is no longer covering autos at the Wall Street Journal’s Southfield, Mich. bureau. No word on his next stop or his replacement. . . . Washington Times business editor Dean Honeycutt has left the paper and Sol Sanders arrives as international business editor. . . . Reporter Chris Bjorke is the new automotive contact at the Tribune in Bismarck, N.D. . . . Donny Nordlicht has left NextNewNetwork and now provides automotive content for the Rye, NY Record. (donny.min@gmail.com). Read the rest of this entry »

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