QOTD: How Do You Fix Automotive Media?

This could be a bit within baseball, but two major automotive media web pages, CNET and The Generate, seemingly let some writers and editors go recently.

The Generate is owned by Recurrent Ventures, a non-public-equity firm, and CNET is owned by Red Ventures.

Red Ventures, coincidentally or not, also offloaded some of the other brands it owns.

I am not crafting this to pile on to any individual who got permit go or to consider how great any just one of those people individuals was at their work (my own take, even though I am biased as I’ve fulfilled some of these folks, is that these are excellent editors and writers who didn’t should have the ax), but rather to pose a bigger dilemma.

We know that the automotive media has shrunk in current several years. Enthusiast titles, largely print rags, have been shuttered. Well-known World-wide-web websites seem to die out of nowhere (see: Push Tribe). The buff books are thinner, in phrases of print internet pages, than they utilised to be and more advertisement-weighty.

The issue is, there is a current market for automotive content. A marketplace that, in theory, at least primarily based on what I listen to and see anecdotally, must be ready to help several World-wide-web web-sites and outlets, masking various niches. Specialized niche titles aren’t dying mainly because of a absence of desire from lovers, but since of broader adjustments in the economics of media, at the very least in this author’s viewpoint.

In other words, there’s place out there for internet sites over and above the in-current market purchasing internet sites (Automobiles.com/Automobile Trader), the buffs (Car and Driver, Road&Monitor), and web-sites like this one.

So I request you, if you were being some guru of media and organization, how would you aid independent automotive articles? Would it be to have fewer crazy expectations for advancement in comparison to personal-equity corporations (the knock on PE corporations is that they tend to make cuts if income is excellent but not to the percentage they’d like)? Subscriptions and paywalls? Come across a benefactor or benefactors that will invest funds but not interfere in editorial independence? Have the OEMs generate a fund for journalism, with the agreement that the producers would not be involved at all in written content*? A little something else?

Yeah, I know, if another person had figured it all out by now, that individual would probable be a wealthy media mogul. However, I am curious.

What say you?

*Not my notion, saw it on the tweet machine.

[Image: Shutterstock.com/Daniel Tadevosyan]

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