The Tom-Tom

 Autowriters.Com invites readers to submit their own Clog  (Online Column).  Your reward: a byline and an audience of your peers.  All submissions are  acknowledged, queued and used at the editor’s discretion. 

Can Automotive Magazines Survive
the Online Tsunami?
 

Publishers’ stress levels are off the charts thanks to sharply reduced ad revenues, higher fulfillment costs, and a mass exodus of readers to online blogs, forums, and shopping services.  The iPod generation of car buyers and enthusiasts favor pixels over print, and tree huggers have set their wrath on newsstand waste. Sounds like a perfect storm. (more…)

 Autowriters.Com invites readers to submit their own Clog (Online Column).  Your reward: a byline and an audience of your peers.  All submissions are acknowledged, queued and used at the editor’s…

Williams takes a bulb of truth and grows it into a mutant stalk. The simple truth about newspaper car reviews is that 95 percent of the reporting in the vast majority of them (sometimes 100 percent) could come without ever driving the car. By bleating that TTAC is better because it’s purer than thou, Williams is being aggressively ignorant—maybe from inexperience, I don’t know him. I’ve just read some of the TTAC reviews. You could fill many issues of autowriters.com with examples of horrible, inaccurate TTAC autojournalism that he thinks is clever and truthful—and I’d cite them if there were room here. They serve no more purpose for consumers, in fact less, than the shallow non-critical newspaper reviews he trashes.

There’s nothing wrong with covering an industry and events from the outside. That’s the traditional reporter’s role, and objectivity frequently demands that we not get too close to the people and events we’re covering. Yet there’s value in getting your hands dirty - particularly if you’re covering motorsports.