LA Times Auto Coverage Descends Into Disgrace
TTAC commentator Muholland Mike writes… " As an avid reader and sometimes poster on your site I have a follow up to this story [ about the elimination of the LA Times Highway One section, and the banishment to Pulitzer Prize winning auto critic Dan Neil to the Business section]. I opened up my Wed. LA times yesterday morning to find that the Auto section hadn't really gone away, it has just morphed into one of these hideous "special" sections full of crap/pr based stories on some lame ass theme like: "Luxury cars for morons." So it seems that GM and the local LA dealers have won out. Dan Neil is banished to the back of the Friday business section and the advertising department is now in complete control of the "new and improved" Automotive section, Just like every other sell-out newspaper in America." Speaking as TTAC's publisher, I look forward to the day when we can afford to hire Dan Neil.
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That's fine, but whether it's $100 or $200, the point remains that it's going to be a long time before you're paying $6,000, or $2,000, or even $1,000. Which is why the ranks of bloggers are presently populated by a few superb writers who have few equals in the print world; a number of "surprisingly good" writers, you might say; and an endless horde of cliche-seeking missiles who can neither spell nor punctuate and consider creative writing to be frequent repetitions of the phrases "ya think?" and "not so good." To coin a phrase, it gets old.
Ya think?
So far, there has been enormous resistance--as TTAC can attest--to anybody paying for what is universally considered to be "free content." So I doubt that in 10 years, or even far longer, that will ever be an income stream for websites. So how about advertising as income? Well, I have never so much as noticed an ad on a website (including TTAC) as anything but an annoying distraction, typically with a bopping long-legged silhouette lady or other infuriating graphic. I have never clicked on an advertiser's link or opened a highlighted word, and I don't know anybody who has. I think the ad industry will eventually realize that ads on websites are a waste of everyone's time--users as well as advertisers. My guess is that in a decade, we won't see newsstands with 500 different magazines ("Lizard Lover," "Front-Wheel-Drive Compacts," "Binocular World," etc.) but 50 good ones--the survivors. And maybe there will be a national newspaper survivor or three, rather than two or three in every large city. Print will survive, though special-interest stuff will inevitably migrate to the web, since it is of limited general interest. (Car enthusiasts, for example, comprise at best three percent of drivers. And look at the results of TTAC's own recent "Who Are We?" survey. Fewer than 900 respondents. Even if we imagine that only 10 percent of all relatively frequent TTAC readers bothered to participate, that's an audience of less than 9,000--smaller than my local small-town newspaper's subscriber list.) But the web will not in our lifetimes be a paying proposition--too many people who will provide the content for free.