Car and Driver magazine sent out a note this morning informing people that, yes, they were going to cut their 12 annual issues to just six issues. And, yes, they’ll be charging you the same amount. This joins the long list of pretty much awful news about media because media, as we know it, is dying. The good news is you can save it.
Yeah, this is going to be a plea to become a member. Please do that. If you love The Autopian and can afford to support it I hope you will do it. No one else is going to do the hard work of figuring out what an “Ion Flush” is while also buying terrible, terrible vans and writing about it.
The sad reality is that I know way more journalists who have lost jobs than gained jobs in the last few years. In just the last two weeks we’ve seen the venerable and important (to me at least) Pitchfork get folded into GQ and, of course, this resulted in a bunch of layoffs. And then Sports Illustrated, the biggest name in sports journalism for the entire time I’ve been alive, laid off almost its entire staff. Plenty of sites I love feel like hollowed-out versions of themselves.
There was a sense when I was a young blogger that we, as bloggers, were going to be the undoing of journalism. This didn’t turn out to be the case as blogs and bloggers, as much as anyone, are susceptible to the same negative pressure created in the marketplace. It’s easy to point to social media and, especially, Facebook, as being responsible for the death of your favorite websites. There’s some truth to that, but it wasn’t primarily journalists clamoring to give up all their content to Facebook. It was the money.
And, of course, private equity is bad for journalism. It’s almost impossible to argue otherwise (many of the writers here left a site that was ruined by private equity ownership and is rumored to be looking to dump some of its assets). Sports Illustrated was, indeed, “choked out by private equity morons” who thought that they could do better because they went to The Wharton School or whatever. But Sports Illustrated had already been a troubling case before that when it was owned by a major establishment media company.
Both Car and Driver (Hearst), which just announced the reduction in issues, and Pitchfork (Conde Nast) are part of media companies that are more than a century old. The Washington Post is already owned by one of the world’s richest men and it’s been reducing staff at a quick rate. So it can’t just be private equity.
I’ve worked for numerous media companies over the last few years as an employee or a contractor/consultant and there were always two major problems:
- Advertisers were the target instead of readers/subscribers.
- The people who were responsible for making the money didn’t know, or didn’t care, about the journalism.
Look at pretty much any outlet, automotive or otherwise, and see if that tracks. It probably does. Go to an established car magazine’s website and see how easy it is to actually see the articles behind all the ads. How much content is there and how much of what you see is about awards that are essentially made up to get more money from advertisers and not inform the reader (even if the journalists often do a great job of informing the reader).
I’m always trying to limit the number of ads on this website but there’s immense external pressure to add more because that’s what advertisers expect. Publishers are penalized in our current system for putting fewer ads on the website.
Then there are the newer-style automotive outlets that try to overwhelm Google News and other platforms with multiple articles on the same thing written not by experts, as we try to do, but by a young and inexperienced writer who is happy to take $20 for an article. Expertise is expensive. I’m not going to name the sites, but you’ve probably clicked on their links. Ask yourself: Do you know anything about those authors? Artificial intelligence is only going to make this worse, of course. There are plenty of sites using AI to support their written journalism.
When layoffs hit they sometimes cut sales staff and admins but they pretty much always let go of journalists, which tells you all you need to know about how much the journalism matters to the people who make the decisions.
If this is depressing to you, here are some things you can do about it. I’m going to put it in terms of supporting The Autopian but it’s true for other sites as well, including Defector, Aftermath, and many others.
- Become a member! The more money we make from membership the less we have to get elsewhere. It’s that simple. Right now we have about 1,100 paying members and they cover about 10-15% of our overhead, which is almost entirely staff. Our goal is to get to 20-30% as it allows us to deal with shifting ad markets.
- Subscribe to our newsletter. It’s the thing we most own in terms of our audience.
- Follow us on Flipboard, Apple News, Google News, et cetera.
- Bookmark our homepage!
That’s the big stuff. It’s no guarantee that we’ll last forever, but our goal isn’t to try and squeeze out a revenue multiple in order to sell this thing in two years. Our goal is to make the world’s best car website, make it every day, and do it in a way that’s sustainable for everyone involved forever.
I used to write the odd article for Autoweek years ago and also for Total
911. Your comments are spot on. I do not even have C/D bookmarked these days.
Now, every new car has hundreds of reviews and videos from bloggers so that print reviews are of limited value. There are a few mags I subscribe to – Octane and Motorsport from the UK and a highly specialized Porsche magazine called 000.
I am happy to be a
Member here as you have original content which is key.
When I got my latest car,a 992 GT3RS I must have seen 500 video reviews and discussions that started a year before it was released. In the old print days the actual news came from the magazines.
So,the Autopian is not about the latest news-nor should it. As I write this I got a pop-up from Porsche on the new electric Macan to log onto the world wide premiere (not interested ) but such is the immediacy of information.
I will be passing through Nashville in a while and will go to the Lane museum because of Jason’s wacky reviews however.
I do hope the membership approach works. Clearly a hard-working team and you deserve to be successful!
You already make the world’s best car website,well done. This was a good piece as well,thanks for tak the time to explain.
Not surprised. I just ended my subscription just after it renewed because I was reminded that I never actually opened the plastic bag that any of the issues came in, let alone read any of them. I intended to, but it just didn’t happen.
The more time I spend on this whole newfangled internet thing, the more I want to support good creators directly because anything that is purely ad-supported eventually degrades to complete garbage.
It seems the magazines want go off to oblivion, I have subscribed for years to every car magazine I could get. In past, I was aggressively solicited to renew. Recently, my subs keep expiring. I will miss print dearly.
My 2nd real job after college was with a company named NeoData (later bought by EDS). They did magazine subscription fulfillment for a number of publishers. If you wondered why so many magazines had subscription PO boxes in Boulder, CO, that’s why. Car and Driver was one of the titles I was a customer service rep for. We collected a LOT of customer data there to sell, far more inefficiently than what came later via Facebook, etc. That’s when I understood that advertisers were the customers and the readers were the product.
C&D has actually made some excellent content under these restrictions. I hate to see the number of issues reduced. Same when they did it to Road & Track. I subscribe to both. I also subscribe to Evo and Octane despite being in the US. I retain info so much better from ink on dead trees than on screen.
BTW, magazine with the worst customers was Modern Bride which was exacerbated by horrid policies. They published quarterly and absolutely refused to send replacement issues if one was lost or damaged. We could only extend the subscription longer. “But that won’t help, the wedding will be over by then!” Usually it was the mother of the bride who was yelling at us reps, not the actual bride.
Lots of people remember P.J. O’Rourke’s contributing pieces to Car & Driver, but I wanted to mention Charles Fox just because no one else has.
I bought a small stack of mint late sixties C&D issues from an autojumble at the end of last year. Some of them have columns by Charles Fox.
Back in my formative years in the 80s I was a C&D subscriber and huge fan of the staff.
I know I have been part of the decline in the quality of journalism because I’ve consumed all the “free” internet content right along with everyone else. Well, it turns out there has been a very real cost for the “free” content as quality and content have been severely degraded for so many outlets. I value the vision and the content here and that’s why I was one of the very early subscribers and upgraded from Vinyl to Velour this year. I wish I could spring for Rich Corinthian Leather, but that’s a bit beyond the budget at this point.
I hope this little revolution against the prevailing trends can continue to succeed.
Bummed to hear that about C&D, but not surprised. I’ve subscribed since 1984 and I do miss what it used to be. I still occasionally go get my 80s copies of car magazines and read them for fun. Like @EricTheViking, I used to get five magazines a month (C&D, R&T, Automobile, Motor Trend and Sports Car International – anyone remember that one?) and would read every one cover to cover. I do like some of the things that C&D has done in recent years – it’s not all dudes, and they’ve done articles on subjects that never would have been covered 20 years ago – but I still feel that it’s not what it was in a bad way, too. Only Ezra Dyer is the kind of writer that reminds me of people like Jean Lindamood with her One Lap reports or DED Jr., even with his shoulder-patches-and-shotguns vibes.
I’ve probably been a bit insulated from the changes to journalism because for news I’m resolutely old-fashioned, having had a daily subscription of the NYT to my front door for about 25 years. It’s not cheap but I believe in supporting good journalism and I can afford it. I believe in supporting y’all, so I re-upped last week.
I admit that I have, to a decent approximation, never visited the web sites of any of the legacy car mags. I also do not read local newspapers online because their sites are, uniformly, unreadable garbage.
P.S. I just followed you on Apple News – more because it helps you than anything else, as I don’t really use Apple News – but it wasn’t easy. When I searched for ‘The Autopian’ I simply couldn’t find it – I had to open this article on the browser on my phone and click on the link you provided.
I used to read five of legacy magazines (Automobile, Autoweek, Car and Driver, Motor Trend, and Road & Track) during the 1980s and 1990s. I would spend several hours per month reading many articles by David E. Davis, Jean Jennings (I am sure she inspired Mercedes Streeter), LJK Setright, etc.
Then, I stopped. The reason is mostly due to lot of excellent journalists passing away, retiring, or finding different life paths. Then, the articles got shorter and shorter while losing lot of substance. It’s like diluting the soup with so much water and putting in the smaller bowl, making the article three- to four-minute reading in length. Some went so woke or unhinged leftist like Jalopnik, belittling the Canadian Truckers, mocking people who don’t wear masks or get vaccinated against Covid-19, etc. (which is probably the main reason for the exodus of several journalists who formed The Autopian).
Today, many of them are simply parroting whatever the news comes in without verifying the fact and such. Case in point: Mullin Automotive Museum. Recently, many of them just wrote “world’s largest Bugatti collection” without checking whether it was true or just stretching the truth. I know Musée National de l’Automobile — Collection Schlumpf has 123 Bugatti vehicles while Mullin Automotive Museum has only paltry 19 vehicles and 75 pieces of furniture by Bugatti (according to its website).
I still read auto motor und sport (excellent German magazine with lot of in-depth analysis), road tests, road trips, second-hand vehicle analysis, and such) and The Autopian.
Jalopnik being too woke is definitely not the reason this website was started. These are some of the leftiest lefties in the business, god bless them.
“God bless them”??? How ludicrously deluding…
What good have the leftists and woke politicians done for the United States beside the rampant illegal migration at the southern border, unabated shoplifting in the stores, angry retaliations against people who don’t care about the gender ideology and who don’t comply with the globalist/Democrat ideologies, homeless people camping out on the sidewalks, sending billions of dollars to Ukraine and other countries, abandoning the $80 billion worth of US military equipment to the Taliban in Afghanistan, committing countless election fraud, etc.?
I think not.
This might be the most fact-free comment I have ever read here. And waste your time responding to me if you like, I won’t engage.
Wow. Just, wow.
Haha. Do you guys get a pamphlet or something with all this mindless baloney on it? Or are you spoofing right wing nonsense? This country was built by progressives and it’s progressives that are trying to save it. Also, it’s hilariously ironic to talk about “angry retaliation” by the left when the conservative candidate for president is running on a platform of angry retaliation.
I hated the slideshows on Jalopnik, oh and the constant ads that overheated my phone and made the website borderline unusable.
And that guy that drove around at night with only his high beams on.
I have was a C&D subscriber for just over two decades. Things have been up and down for years, but the issues became thin. Then they thinned more by moving to 10/year. Then, after 23 years, I let me subscription lapse. I miss reading Ezra Dyer in print.
Since the inception of the Autopian I have been reading. When subscriptions rolled out I didn’t bite and have been on the fence since then. Today, I became a member because of this article. You all provide the automotive journalistic content I used to receive from 4 separate magazine subscriptions ( C&D, R&T, HMN and HCC). That deserves to be compensated. Keep up the great work, all.
the bez is the most private of equity. just him doing what ever he wants. if it wasn’t for the the e man then the bez would have more static/attention for his actions.
I absolutely devoured this magazine as a kid starting in 1992 and subscribed until around 2005. I stopped then not because of the internet but their change in direction, away from comparison tests to fetching splashy solo pieces on exotic and sports cars almost exclusively. The quality of the writing had become mundane and formulaic and photography virtually indistinguishable from PR collateral.
They simply failed to write about what I cared about: cars I interacted with in real life, instead morphing into a cartoonish hybrid of Robb Report and Motor Trend which I disliked for its slavish promotion of some brands and photography which was too polished and flattering.
Classic C&D is still a joy to read. I miss their voice and verve. I subscribe to many print publications because I enjoy reading on paper not screens but I’m unwilling to support poor writing on cars I am not interested in.
Absolutely this. Thanks for expressing it much better than I ever could. Yes the super-exotics were fun, but they stopped with the more attainable vehicles – my lifelong buddy was so stoked when “his” Contour SVT was featured in print. It was the first car I ever drove that didn’t turn like a tuna boat and it was in a magazine!!! Mostly for me the comparos went from many multiples of cars to just a few, if not head-to-head, which really was not my preference.
Even so I hate newsletters, I just now subscribed to yours. It never occurred to me that this is another way of supporting you, besides membership. Thanks for pointing that out. And pardon my ignorance.
Yeah, and it’s mostly links to the articles on the site so it’s actually convenient to use as a way of signing in
It could be worse. A LOT worse. Look at scientific publishing:
Academia – Publish or perish! You do all the work, unpaid by the journals and to add insult to injury you have to PAY the journals to publish your work!
You and other academics are professionally obligated to peer review work, unpaid by the journals.
Hey, you got published! Congratulations! You get nothing for your work from the journal except maybe a letter. That won’t get you even a cup of coffee.
To do your work you need to keep up with the work of others. To do that you need to get behind the journal’s paywall. You have a choice, either subscribe to each journal at a couple of hundred bucks a year or pay ~ $30 per article with no assurance it will actually be of any use and much of the time it is not. Normally this is paid for by the university but its still money not spent on your salary.
The journals OTOH get paid by their talent, paid by their subscribers and get much of their technical talent for free.
What a racket!! Its almost as bad as academia!
I really turned away from the mainstream car books and their sites ten plus years ago. Automobile was my favorite, and the best-written, but it was gutted and ultimately folded into Motor Trend, which got a British editor and suddenly every cover had a “Shock” headline. If I wanted that I’d buy Car magazine. In fact all them seem to be supercars all the time. Pretty thin gruel, and why I turned to Jalopnik and now here.
The only car magazine I subscribe to now is Collectible Automobile, and I have every issue since number 1. I recently dropped Hemmings Classic Car, as even it is off the boil, journalistically. Sad.
Car is unreadable now, and the photography is terrible. A tragedy.
I don’t really *read* it – I sometimes browse it on the newsstand (LOL, what’s a newsstand) but what I do like about Collectible Automobile is that, as far as I can tell, it is exactly what it has always been.
+1 for Collectible Automobile, I almost have every issue, and they continue to be what they started off as and deliver spot on content, as expected. I still enjoy C&D too, but their artsy style plays havoc with my aging eyes. What I can still read in it despite the thin font text on colored backgrounds from from Ezra Dyer and others is still pretty good content, just less and less…and now apparently less frequently. I hope they at least make it thru my 2028 subscription expiration.
As someone who’s in this line of work myself, I feel sad at what’s happening. I wish it could be better.
Sadly, money talks. I wish we could do all these for free and not worry about feeding ourselves, but that’s not how the world works unfortunately.
I’ve been a subscriber since June ’92, and have been anticipating this since about 1995, when the internet started to become A Thing. Even back then I vowed to subscribe to the paper version until the very end,and I’m going to keep that vow.
I can’t really put into words what Car and Driver has really meant to me over the years other than to say that this is llike watching one of my best friends waste away from an incurable disease.
It’s so hard to accept this moment has arrived. At the peak, the magazine was over 200 pages for multiple months in a row. I think 212 was the highest number of pages ever published in one month. Recently it’s been 80 pages, and only 10 months per year. At least John Phillips is back in the saddle.
For anybody who doesn’t know how their legend was forged, here are some of the greats I can remember off the top of my head:
And wasn’t there something about Bedard smoking pot and driving around a closed course to determine the effect of THC on driving?
a very nice obit. I was a motor trend guy, it is like watching a friend die.
I’ve been a subsciber to C&D since 1984, and like you it was a big part of my life and development of my automotive enthusiasm. Road trip articles like the Prudhoe Bay one you mention are what sparked my passion for road trips.
I’m going to hang on until the end, because that’s what I do, plus I need this collection of magazines to be complete.
C&D, and R&T both had a lot of influence in me growing up, and I had subscriptions to both from 8-18. But growing up with the Internet, I soon found my fix at a cheaper price (free).
Now having seen the entirety of internet evolution to this point, and the near death of something I used to financially support, I can wisely say: Pay for the things you hold dear and value. This place is special. Don’t take the good times for granted.
Well said.
There is a part of me that wonders if enough people really appreciate “quality writers “ anymore. For any genre.
Or editors.
Publishers certainly don’t. 🙁
And private equity MBAs least of all.
aren’t allow to develop. and they have to create clickbate. I won’t say which one, but it is beyond the dumb shit I see on many sites.
Used to devour C&D whenever I could get a copy. Parents eventually bought me a subscription for xmas one year which I kept up through University. Read Davis, Yates, Csere, Jeanes, Lindamood, Setright, re-discovered O’Rourke after Nat Lampoon and Rolling Stone. Also consumed R&T, MotorTrend various Sports Car, Hot Rod and Muscle Car and other specialty mags. My interests changed and I drifted away from the magazines. Sad to see them all fading away.
No, they were already doing only 10 issues a year, not 12.
It’s so incredibly sad that anyone attempting to write for a living has to be a full time hustler as well. I wonder at how much good writing is lost to the abyss because there’s no mother publications to provide a steady income and benefits so the talent could focus on being talented.
I know folks who’ve walked away who were good reads, but there’s very little pay or stability in this line of work. Even I was looking at regular desk jobs in this last round of unemployment-via-layoff, and it felt like giving up. It sucks.
Damn, this sucks. C&D is one of the mags that consistently puts out stuff I want to read. I just hope their six issues are decently thick to make up for it.
This whole industry is bleak as hell. It really feels like there’s no future outside of a few outlets with better business models. Trying to avoid private equity hellscapes or places that felt a bit too friendly to their advertisers meant I was out of work for a painfully long time and depressed as hell given that employers outside of journalism seemed to think my resume translated into “ten years of goofing off and playing with cars.”
Something’s gotta give.
I wonder if, after hitting rock bottom, it’ll get better for skilled journalists like yourself.
Information is getting to the point of becoming so democratized that it’s become, in many forms, nearly worthless. And maybe that’s what gives – people will finally realize that as with everything else, when you get something for free, you get the quality for which you paid.
Just as people are increasingly willing to pay for good services, soon, it’ll be for good information as well perhaps.
I think it’s about the value we provide. Someone asked me recently whether AI will eventually replace writers. My sorta response (I didn’t really articulate fully in reply) was that there still needs to be a personal touch in some way in order to engage readers.
Any program can regurgitate facts and stats, but for me, the best stories are the ones that reflect the author’s personality and experiences. It’s writing about things that only you experienced yourself, and only you can tell. Like, there’s no way any AI program can write about what Torchinsky writes about, for example.
Those are the most compelling reads IMO.
So in a way, good writers will put themselves in their writing more and more, to make it even more authentically them, that there’s a human in this page of symbols?
Funny how though he’s fairly out of fashion in some quarters, Hemingway was really on to something with “write what you know!”
You have a far more optimistic view than I do, but I hope you’re right. Something has to give. People still want interesting and informative stuff to read. The demand is there. More outlets just need to give a damn about fulfilling that demand.
The way I see it, it’s the likely trajectory of our economy. Back when it was manufacturing-oriented, services provision was seen largely as a complementary add-on, some needed professional services but a lot of more low-skill ones.
But as the economy changed into a service-focused one, demand grew for high-end services.
Now, as it transforms again into an information economy, demand may grow for high-end information provision, like your and your colleagues provide!
What’s key from my point of view is that living standards are continuing to rise in real terms. Which tends to mean both that people have more resources to allocate to things they want and generally will tend to prefer better quality in those things.
The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?
Automobile was one of the first go several years ago. R/T turned into a wanna be lifestyle magazine with a few mentions of auto related things and I left them. I, like many of you, have been subscribed to every car mag out there since the mid 70’s and am sad to see them slowing going away. These digital car sites are great but I’m not dragging my PC to the commode with me, you know, the royal reading room complete with a throne ha ha