Stop The Presses — Again! Scott Burgess Quits — Again!

Looks like it’s time for some more Scott Burgess news! Mr. Burgess, whose very existence had long been unknown outside a select circle of hotel room-service supervisors and parakeets who had acquired literacy due to a ruthlessly effective program of eugenics at Petland stores, briefly made Internet headlines last year when he went crazy on a Chrysler 200, quit his paper, was rehired, and fell back into line — not to mention obscurity.

Turns out you can’t keep a good man down. Having briefly tasted the Internet fruit, Scott’s decided to take a job at the salad bar.

According to Bill Shea’s “For Immediate Release…” column in Crain’s Business News… Wait. Do we have time to make a joke about somebody? Of course we do. This is the column header for the “For Immediate Release…” column:

After seeing this graphic, I’m thinking the best candidates for “immediate release” are the children trapped in Bill Shea’s basement. Just kidding, big guy, I read you every week. Back to the story. In his article, which is titled “Detroit New Auto Coverage Team Decimated After Critic Scott Burgess Quits For Job Elsewhere”, Mr Shea notes that the Roman centurion in charge of the Detroit News decided to slay every tenth member of the department to punish them for permitting Burgess to depart without resistance. No, wait. That’s a different meaning of the word “decimate”, one which Mr. Shea calls “archaic” in his response to a commenter on the article. It turns out that “archaic”, like “decimate”, has been given a new meaning by Shea, and that meaning is “a word, the meaning of which eludes me at the moment.” Back to the decimation. Shea actually writes that

Longtime Detroit News auto critic Scott Burgess — he of the infamous Chrysler 200 review incident — is quitting the newspaper at the end of the month for a job at AOL Autos.

“I’m leaving because I think it’s a great opportunity to do more things with AOL Autos, working out of their office in Birmingham,” he told me via email. “I’ll still be writing about cars and the auto industry, contributing to both AOL Autos and Autoblog as a senior editor. For me professionally, it’s a chance to reach a much larger and broader audience.”

This marriage of journosaurs and online media has been tried before, with miserable results (cf. Brock Yates here at TTAC, a variety of people at “Motive”). If there is a place for the buffet-browsers to land online, however, it’s Autoblog. We wish Mr. B the best and look forward to more hard-hitting coverage. The Detroit News, on the other hand, is in a real pickle:

…the paper wants some sort of sharing deal for his AOL content, or something like that, but I don’t know that to be true. It certainly sounds plausible and cheaper. And veteran professional auto critics aren’t exactly readily available.

Uh huh, in the sense that used condoms aren’t readily available in the trash cans of the metro Detroit Motel 6. Seriously, you would think Shea didn’t live in a city with homeless shelters.

In the event that Scott, like Jeff Glucker and Matt Davis, arrives at AOL Autos on a day on which they are not giving the Ethics Lecture, I’d like to offer some suggestions on behavior.

Autobloggers may:

• Clear someone of rape charges by offering unsolicited character testimony;
• Get people excited about a million-dollar auction while forgetting to mention that it’s for your dad’s stuff;
• provide unintentional self-referential hilarity;
• write airline lifestyle articles masquerading as road tests in order to acquire free trips to Spain.

Autobloggers may not:

• accidentally place their own advertising content in the middle of the other advertising content.

Got it? Then take, these broken wings, and learn to fly again, Scott! Learn to live so free!