Now, Buckle Up

I don’t take the profession of journalism lightly. Unfortunately for me, and you, the automotive media industry has bastardized and contorted the meaning of journalism to indescribable ends. High budget, high traffic websites now overload your senses with clickbait (vapid listicles), regurgitations (copycat blogs), and otherwise tedious minutiae (word salads) that bare no reflections of this sacred profession in the least.

Then again, why would these sites hold journalism to such high esteem? The type of work that true journalism demands is not incentivized. The all-powerful Google machine does not revere exclusive stories that took hours and hours of combined question preparation, interviewing subject matter experts with these questions, tracking down inside sources to verify their statements, transcribing conversations into text, and finally, writing something worthy of your time.

Instead, Google reveres rapid fire “content” that’s in some form of legible English, with a specific word or phrase unnaturally plugged into the text body for the search engines to feed on, how many links are inserted, and if your SEO is done correctly. Doing it right yields a sugar rush of favorable numbers back to the publication. But like most sugary things, it tends to lack substance and nutrition. And addicted readers are consuming too much of it.

As a result, the art form that writing once was is now on life support in the name of “progress” during this overwhelming “information age.” Moreover, newswriting done by humans is now endangered due to advancements in automation. And “journalism” has become a cavernously hollow word.

Why? Because Journalism is more expensive, more demanding, more creative, and more time consuming than just paying a useful idiot $20 to launder somebody else’s hard work into a new string of words that pass as a blog post. With this publishing model taking incredible effect, the paradox becomes the following: if everybody is relying on somebody else to produce original content, where, then, will the original content come from?

With a decade of experience in automotive media, this is a problem I aim to solve. For its little part, this site will solely produce original, exclusive stories, largely focusing on automotive journalism. This is for the sake of automotive journalism itself, and for the sake of you, the reader, to be informed on the latest automotive news of substance. Not the minutiae.