How people feelin about more car mags shutting down.?

I'm brand new print subscriber to GRN and just got this note from "the other guys" that publish Hot Rod and MotorTrend etc

After many great years and achievements, Chevy High Performance, Car Craft, Super Chevy, Street Rodder, magazines have been discontinued.

They killed off a bunch more, but these are the ones I subscribe to that are shutting down.

I'm a bit sad about it myself because I like the print and don't like having my face in a screen all the time. But on the other hand, most of the mags had become advertorials and not really the grassroots stuff people are interested in.

Here's the other current discussion on this topic: https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/more-magazine-closures/161681/page1/

Kind of a shame. Even in this digital age where information is available at the push of your computers button always enjoyed holding the actual magazine. I grew up in the age where you actually looked forward to the postman bringing the latest addition and always kept old editions for reference. Also miss newspapers and sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee before going to work and finding out what was happening in the world. Unfortunately papers quit reporting the news and became nothing but opinions most times not to my liking. In my area the daily paper became three times a week and the price kept going up for two day old news. I guess magazines have become dinosaurs in the age of instance gratification for people who no longer enjoy reading or for that matter have the ability to read.

To be honest, I wonder how the majority of magazines stay afloat.

I'll pick up whatever random magazine waiting at the doctor's office or in the waiting lobby somewhere and it's almost nothing but ads. There's likely more ads than there are articles or they're pretty close to 50/50.

They either need to trim the fat or produce better content if they want to keep readership up. Filling your magazine with 70% ads and maybe 30% of content is not the way and will just drive people away to something else.

When I see watches in car magazines, I start to get nervous. 

It's disappointing for sure, but I'm to blame as well. I only subscribe to GRM and CM. And I don't frequent the book store like I used to, to look see if there was anything else interesting to pick up.

I also like physically holding the magazine, the pictures, etc. 

In reply to FuzzWuzzy :

Lord Beaverbrooke did say editorial content is their merely to keep the ads from running together.

Woody said:

When I see watches in car magazines, I start to get nervous. 

I stopped getting AW over a decade ago when they went from a car magazine to a lifestyle magazine.

The REAL reason print magazines are going away is because the writing sucks, IMHO.  I had been a very long subscriber to R&T, C&D, and AW, but all of them had gone down the writing drain many years ago, so I stopped.  To me, this time should have happened a long, long time ago based on the writing.  

For sure, I very much prefer reading paper, and have only once tried to read GRM's digital edition.  Thankfully, GRM/CM is very well written, and the paper version survives.

My previous magazine was Vintage Racing Journal, but they stopped doing print magazines for some reason- once they did, I canceled my remaining subscription.  Even though I knew the owner of the magazine, and even spoke to him on the phone.  He tried the "people need to preserve this history" guilt trip, and I didn't reply that it's also the magazine writer's responsibility to produce a good that is worthy of being paid for.

Same goes for newspapers.  Sad that they went away, but it's their fault, not mine- the writing of the local news has been horrible.  Of course the newspaper will die when it's that.  

I can go on with my rant, but i'll stop there.  IMHO, it's the magazine's responsibility to write well enough to warrant me to spend money.

FuzzWuzzy said:

To be honest, I wonder how the majority of magazines stay afloat.

I'll pick up whatever random magazine waiting at the doctor's office or in the waiting lobby somewhere and it's almost nothing but ads. There's likely more ads than there are articles or they're pretty close to 50/50.

They either need to trim the fat or produce better content if they want to keep readership up. Filling your magazine with 70% ads and maybe 30% of content is not the way and will just drive people away to something else.

Worse, a lot of the car magazines have been having trouble separating the ads from the content. Make an article smell too much like product placement, and the readers will pick up on it. The TEN titles seemed especially prone to this.

Another problem can be audience drift. I had let my Hot Rod subscription lapse when it went off to a lot of high dollar builds and not enough accessible tech articles I could apply to my own car.

On one hand I'm sad about it.  Then I try to remember the last time I bought a magazine and realize I am part of the problem.  I subscribe to GRM/CM but the only time I look at other magazines is when I'm in the UK or my mom comes to visit in which case I will grab, or get her to grab the current issue of MOTORSPORT and or Octane.  If those magazines were published her or sold here with a sensible cover price I'd get them.  I've looked into subscriptions and it's over $100 for either.  It's just not worth it.  

The actual writing in GRM/CM isn't the best in the business, but the content keeps people coming back. R&T is actually one of the best of the domestic magazines for writing quality - they changed focus about four years ago and made that a priority. It's the only magazine I pick up where I check the bylines first. I'll read a Sam Smith article about watching grass grow, and the combination of Zach Bowman and discomfort is gold. The Brit magazines are overall better at this because the Brits love language and they learned that success lies in being a premium product instead of racing to the bottom like TEN did.

The problem is that online, everyone is a publisher. You find an outlet that has the exact sort of content you want - snark, 1980's Hondas, ratty supercars, whatever - and spend your time reading that little niche publication instead of buying magazines.

I pay to read evo magazine because the writing is excellent and the photos are spectacular. They focus on the feel of driving and the joy it brings. It's even printed on nice paper. I'll gladly pay a premium for all that.

Domestic car magazines seem to be wall-to-wall TireRack and WeatherTech ads with a bit of "advertorial" content in between. "We drove a Chevy Traverse to Nevada and wow the desert is hot! But GM air-con kept our butts cool...and that infotainment system made my Spotify playlist sing! Nickelback never sounded so good. Way to go, GM!" Now here's a picture of ham and eggs from some diner in Henderson.

GRM is an exception because the articles are great and it focuses on nuttier stuff. 

In reply to alfadriver :

I agree that the magazines need better content, and theoretically they should have the ability to produce it. But Newspapers are f----d because good journalism takes money to produce, and  there's simply not enough of it around to pay for a crack staff who is producing a continuous stream of quality content ON A DAILY BASIS. Their model is broken, and I won't blame them for that fact any more than I blame Capitol records for not selling more vinyl. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

It would have been smart for R&T to send a copy to their former subscribers if they have really gotten better.  I've not sampled it for well over a decade now, even though I can read it for free in our company library.  

In reply to Kreb :

I'm not sure I agree with that- in the city my parents live in, they still have a paper delivered every day.  It's well written, covers both local and national items, and apparently makes money- this is a ~60k town in Idaho.  Whereas here in Ann Arbor, with over 100k people, along with the potential of Metro Detroit, we don't have a daily paper.  If a small paper can make money on a small base like that, there's no excuse for a daily paper in Metro Detroit.

When AA News changed over, the writing on line was atrocious, and, sadly, when they did print 2 times a week- it was the exact same articles, totally unedited.  I'm ok paying for a well written paper that mirrors a website, but it was so pathetic that I could not support it.  I suppose I should check to see if it's gotten better, as they are pestering me every other day with discounts to the paper.  That, too, is really annoying.

I'm a lifelong newspaper reader - start every day that way. One thing that I've seen is that they're hiring "safer" columnists who are less likely to be fingered by the current grievance group do jour. And guess what? They're pretty boring. 

It is funny that as the magazines are going away, the threads about them keep appearing. This is the 3rd thread about the same 19 magazines. Will we reach some sort of singularity if we get to 19 threads about it?

I got a CC subscription in 1984.  It was full of advertorials then.

Actually stopped reading CC for a while until the mid 90s when they got hugely awesome.

lots  of my friends  worked decades at the magazines ,  they all were there day to day and saw thru the years how magazines got thinner and thicker  depending on the economy , 

But now very few writers are full time ,  buying a freelance story fills the pages and cost  nothing compared to a real employee with benefits , 

But most writers cannot survive on a freelance story or 2 a month.........chicken or egg ????

In reply to californiamilleghia :

I think the treatmeant of, and relatively few number of quality journalists is very much an egg to the parent chicken of the declining sales here.

Adrian_Thompson said:

In reply to californiamilleghia :

I think the treatmeant of, and relatively few number of quality journalists is very much an egg to the parent chicken of the declining sales here.

 

Who wants to go get a college degree to write for a magazine, to end up making less than a manager at a fast food restaurant? There are a lot of jobs with this problem, teachers being the largest. 

It's why my Journalism degree isn't being used in journalism. When I graduated in 2005, the starting pay for a journalist at the Tulsa World was $24k for a salaried position. Judging by the hours worked, you'd be at maybe $10/hr?

So I took a job with State Farm as a claim rep for almost $40k/yr instead. 

EMS has the same problem too- Paramedics start ~$15/hr, and only on busy 911-tier public departments do you get above $40,000K a year.

As for the magazines, I'm not too upset about it. Like others have said, there's a real sense of "Quantity over quality" in current media and we're still feeling the affects of the adpocalyspe even in print- and to be frank, most of those magazines sucked anyway for using seemingly nothing but sponsored parts and high-dollar builds when 80% of their base couldn't do those things.

Keith Tanner said:

The actual writing in GRM/CM isn't the best in the business, but the content keeps people coming back.

Can we use this in next year's media kits?

In reply to JG Pasterjak :

LOL. For some reason this reminded me of an old joke from the military where some incompetent officer's Fitness Report (his performance review) said something to the effect of, "His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curuiosity."

In reply to Kitsbeach :

On one hand, I can't remember the last time I bought a car magazine. It's probably been close to 15 years. On the other hand, in their unguarded moments, some of those magazines were really good, and big parts of my psyche.

I remember reading a piece in C&D where Csaba Csere absolutely eviscerated Toyota, Toyotas, and Toyota drivers. It was like reading a perfect distillation of thoughts I'd never quite been able to make coherent: the unknowable anger of the young male forced by circumstance into a Corolla, knowing nothing of camshafts, apexes, or torque wrenches, but posessed of a deep certainty that such car exuded virginity, and revealed the malevolence of the world that birthed it.

Csaba's rant came at the height of the "unintended acceleration" scandal. I've looked all over for that article, and it seems to have been excised from the internet, likely by Toyota's PR goons. Csaba's a lot harder to find these days as well. Don't mess with the Spindle-Grill Yakuza.

A few years before that I remember a long article in R&T about Peter Gregg. That really hit home, and I felt like it painted a picture of what motorsports are like, and what they're about. 

MM&FF (a recent casualty) nudged me into drag racing. Car Craft let me know that there was a world built around old, junky cars that didn't involve $10,000 paint jobs and cute little WWII-era couples driving convertibles.

I guess the hobby is just winding down.