Autowriters Spotlight

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.

In a belated tip of the hat to the many fine professional auto writers in Canada this month’s spotlight is on one of their own, Jil McIntosh, who sketches her own auto writing career.

“It’s hard for me to believe – gray hair aside – that I’ve been writing professionally about cars for 25 years. I’d churned out stories since I was a child, and during an early-1980s stint as a taxi driver in Toronto, I met a driver who collected antique cars. I had no interest in vehicles, but when I saw them, I wanted one. I bought a 1948 Chevrolet, and later, the two vehicles I still own, a 1947 Cadillac and 1949 Studebaker pickup truck. (And an antique tractor. Every woman wants an antique tractor.)

Jil McIntosh

I had no formal journalism education, but I started writing for a couple of local publications, Canadian Street Rodder and Old Autos. Along the way, I queried to every car magazine I could find. It wasn’t easy to break in; one editor told me he didn’t publish women because they only wrote about shopping while their husbands were at car shows. I submitted a story anyway, and became their columnist for several years. If anything’s changed the most in 25 years, it’s that women are now taken seriously in this business.

When Canada’s largest daily paper, the Toronto Star, started its weekly Wheels section, I was determined to be part of it. They took my first piece in 1987 – the cover story! – about a hot rod show. I was a semi-regular contributor over the next ten years, until the old-car writer left and I took over his column. Shortly after, I asked why, if women made half of all new-car purchases, there weren’t any women reviewing cars. A week later, I was in a press car, notebook in hand.

Reviewers had specific segments, and mine was entry-level. I endured a lot of teasing from colleagues, asking when I was going to drive “real” cars. It wore thin, until one said, “Think of your readers. Someone spending $70,000 doesn’t care what you think. But someone who only has $18,000 is hanging on your every word.” I’ve never forgotten that. Read the rest of this entry »

John Davis used to wear a red sport coat to press gatherings. A carryover, he says, from the days when television was highlighting its color capability. Or, it could have been a shrewd way of being remembered by PR guys when he called about a car to review for his little known public TV show, MotorWeek. That was 29 years ago and it was the first weekly TV car review in the United States.

John Davis

As he saw it, “Pubic television was at the bottom of the food chain when it came to distributing ad dollars and, in those days, press cars.” Now they review about 175 cars a year but still have to hustle for dollars, “Each year we raise enough money for a season, but there is no guarantee that we will be back the next year.” To make that happen Davis now goes to fewer press events and spends more of his time on the road raising money. “We bring in enough money to pay for ourselves and once-in awhile add something to the station’s budget.” Of late, the show has benefited greatly from being carried on Speed TV and online by www.Cars.com, as well as its own www.Motorweek.com

Davis created the show as a companion to the buff magazines that were the prime consumers sources of automotive information at the time. “We weren’t competing with them. We were providing an educated impression of the cars viewers saw on the covers of those magazines. That’s what we still do.” Only they have to target a broader audience. To do so it is designed in components that can be dropped in and most important, they keep it easily understood. “If a viewer says, ‘what was that,’ he can’t go back and read it again. Its on its gone.”

Davis could well lay away his audience with technical jargon – a gear-head as a kid, he graduated North Carolina State as an aerospace engineer – or pontificate on the auto industry and its problems. He also has a business degree from North Carolina University and worked as a research analyst on Wall Street before becoming executive producer of the venerable Wall Street Week TV show. But, he prefers a self-effacing style that tells viewers more of what they want to know than how much he knows. He was able to create the work he really likes because he volunteered at NC State’s campus radio station, rose to director there and then continued to work in commercial radio and TV to pay his way through NCU.

A number of persons who got the their start with Davis at MotorWeek have moved on in the communications business, among them, Craig Singhaus, now in network broadcasting and Lisa Barrow with Chrysler. While year 30 is his first concern, Davis looks beyond and to the new media. He worries that the rush to be first on the Internet may make superficiality the norm and the trust engendered by good magazines and in-depth product reviews may be sacrificed. On the other hand, he acknowledges that once his show was “the new media” and it took a while for it to establish its place in the automotive communications spectrum.

The Emmy® Award-winning show has brought Davis numerous honors and he, in turn, has lent his talent and energies to auto journalism, driving safety and clean air initiatives. But it is not all work. Over those years he has owned and enjoyed a variety of high performance cars, including a vintage Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Corvette and a deTomaso Pantera.

It’s good news when a newspaper hires an auto writer these days- particularly when they already have one! That’s exactly what the Spokane Spokesman-Review did when the long-time “her” of the paper’s his and her auto reviews, Teresa McCallion, retired after 18 years. The daily affirmed that the woman’s point of view mattered by retaining highly regarded local journalist and essayist Cheryl-Anne Millsap to join veteran Don Adair’s weekly review with a companion piece.

Don Adair

Adair also began writing for the Spokesman-Review in the ‘80s as a “go-to freelancer,” as he put it. “When the paper decided to add a locally generated car column, I was in the right place at the right time. My qualifications were skimpy. I could write and knew how to meet deadlines. I’d owned a few sports cars and had autocrossed a little. I read the magazines when I was a kid and knew the difference between horsepower and torque, but my technical knowledge was — and is — limited.

“Which has proven to be not a bad thing; it’s easy to lose the readers of a daily newspaper in minutiae. I aspire to write well enough to be read by a broader audience than just car nuts.

“Of course the job has its bennies: Besides the great good fortune of driving a new car every week, I’ve met fascinating people and seen parts of the country I wouldn’t have otherwise. Highlights include every time I’ve been turned loose on a track, as well as a pair of Mercedes-Benz programs — one to Montreal where we took in the F1 race and the surrounding circus, and one a three-day Civil War/Civil Rights tour of Alabama.

“But all this goodness has been tempered in the past couple of years by the loss of so many jobs. I wish the best for all those, from every aspect of the industry, whose lives have been turned upside down.

“Both the automobile and newspaper industries will survive, but in fundamentally altered ways. In the online environment, those who have something to say and say it well will emerge from the mob and, although it will be some time before the Internet finds its commercial footing, will find ways to be paid for their efforts.

“A jazz musician friend once told me that he was able to earn a living only by hustling up his own opportunities; I believe the same pertains for those of us who have labored in the newspaper business. We will survive by being flexible and being good.

“I’m lucky to write for a publication that is committed to providing its readers with a quality editorial product with a local voice. But I don’t have any idea a) how long that will last or b) how our industry will look when the dust has settled. I am convinced that the fragmentation of the media is bad for all of us in the short term, but that something coherent will ultimately emerge.

“If not, I fear for more than just our industry.  Despite all this, those of us who are still writing are reporting on an industry — and a culture — in transition; the circumstances are challenging, but the environment has opportunity written all over it.”