Meet Frank Williams

As for Car and Driver, whenever a publication gets more concerned with advertising revenue, than good writing, it is going to go downhill. Many people feel that David E. Davis "saved" Car and Driver; personally, I think he started its slide, many years ago, by focusing too much on getting on Detroit's good side, rather than focusing on good writing. The best C/Ds were when Leon Mandel was editor; and Brock Yates worked side-by-side with him. Now that Brock has been jetisoned, it remains for a new generation of writers to try to take the magazine forward. But here's the deal: they don't really care about the printed magazine. They just hired three new editors for the web edition. And many of those of us who subscribe have gotten queries asking us first, if we knew that the entire magazine is now on-line, and second, if we would pay to (simply) get the magazine delivered to our e-mail boxes. (That way, Hachette-Fillipachi can save money on USPS delivery and printing costs.) So yes, TTAC and other web sites have gotten noticed, because H-F can see that the competition is coming from the Internet. But hardly any Internet sites pay writers enough to get the best. Writers have bills, girlfriends (wives?), boyfriends, lovers, companion animals, rent and mortgages to pay. The best writers want to do it - writing that is - all the time. What makes a person a good writer, also makes them poor performers at other jobs. (That observation came from the writing of the late Hunter S. Thompson and he was one hundred percent correct.) But the key thing is people who put together web sites - not the Farago family but dimbulbs such as CarDomain.com and Edmunds - need to understand what truly good writing is and stop calling it by that soul-less name of "content." I stood next to two Internet empty suits at an Independence Day picnic, two weeks ago, and heard one of them discussing "the importance of content." I resisted the urge to turn to him and tell him, "It's writing, you moron. And you wouldn't likely know good writing if it came up and bit you on the ass!" Same as it ever was.

To me, the piece that personified the "classic" C&D attitude was their road test of the Opel Kadette wagon in, if memory serves me, February 1968. In their review they described it as "a never-ending stream of the third-rate and the underdone, a rolling potpourri of mediocrity." They openly said the car was junk, and to drive home their point all of the photos of the car that accompanied the article were taken in a junk yard and shot in B&W. This was their "flying vagina" moment. It pissed off GM and they pulled all their ads from C&D and every other mag published by the parent company. You sure wouldn't find C&D (or hardly any other print magazine) taking a stance like that today!

Wait a minute, Terry... did you say some internet sites pay their writers????

Uh oh....