Bark's Bites: Vote For Bark to Be Editor-in-Chief of Jalopnik!

Perhaps you haven’t heard, but our good friend, Patrick George, has left his post as Editor-in-Chief of the widely read G/O Media blog, Jalopnik. He’s now at The Drive, which your author finds a bit strange, since I specifically recall Patrick complaining quite a bit about The Drive being trash and stealing all of its ideas from, well, Jalopnik. But the automotive journalism world is a small one, and when most of us talk stuff about competing blogs, it’s mostly because they won’t hire us to write for them anymore. Ahem. Anyway.

With Patrick’s departure, Mike Ballaban has been named the interim EIC, which made me think, great, just what I needed — more white men telling me about cars. But while Mike is generally a good guy who is well-deserving of the job, I can think of somebody who’s even more deserving — me.

That’s right, Jalopnik is looking for a full-time EIC, and I’m just the guy to do it. But I need your support, TTAC readers. Although we may be the Delaware of the Electoral College in comparison to Jalopnik’s New York, our readers are definitely some of the finest people to ever read this blog, and I require your votes in this completely made-up election.

Want reasons why you should cast your ballot for Bark? Read on.

This would seem like a requirement to run a car blog, but you’d be surprised — after all, Jalopnik once hired a managing editor who didn’t own a car. That being said, I’m pretty sure that most of the transplanted New Yorkers who write for Jalopnik own cars, even if they don’t drive them very often. I think my car-owning status makes me a shoo-in.

I’m completely anti-union.

While most of the current Jalopnik writers have the GMG UNION logo as their current avatar on Twitter, I’m ready to bust up some unions in the tradition of the old newspaper giants — with force, if necessary. This won’t be hard, because at my height of 5’9″ (with heels) and weight of 170 pounds, I would immediately become the largest Jalopnik staff member, and by quite a large margin. I will intimidate all of them with my sheer physical presence and scare them into tearing up those union cards. I think Jim Spanfeller, current CEO of G/O Media, will support this.

I voted for Donald Trump.

I keep hearing about how important diversity in the workplace is (even if there doesn’t appear to be a lot of racial/ethnic/gender diversity at Jalopnik), and I’m entirely certain that not a single Jalopnik staffer, freelancer, or reader voted for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 Presidential election. Therefore, as EIC, I will bring that most important element of diversity to the staff, and would hire even more Trump supporters when given the opportunity. Also, every single Jalopnik EIC has been a cis white male, so why break that streak? Make Jalopnik Great Again.

I’m prepared to keep it all about cars.

I’ve heard that the reason that another G/O media site, Deadspin, was completely razed to the ground, was because the writers there refused to keep the focus on the main subject of the site — in Deadspin‘s case, that was sports. In Jalopnik‘s case, that would be cars. Easy! I’ve never, ever, written about politics or social subjects here at TTAC. You guys all have short memories, right? Also, ignore that Trump stuff I just wrote.

I have driven a car in a race, and I didn’t even wreck it

Fun story — I once raced with some Jalopnik guys as part of a kinda crazy idea that American Endurance Racing had about four years ago: Take some Road & Track guys and pit them against some Jalops in nearly identical BMWs as part of an actual race. The R&T guys were Larry Webster, Travis Okulski, Sam Smith, Jason Nikic, and me. The Jalops were Patrick George, Jason Torchinsky, Raphael Orlove, and maybe Bill Caswell, if I’m remembering correctly. Needless to say, the R&T team was ahead by multiple laps after 20 minutes.

Patrick was nice enough to ask me to drive the Jalopnik car on Day Two, which would have made for a fun piece of writing — I would have gotten to drive for both teams over the course of the event. Unfortunately, one of the Jalops spun the car early on and was hit hard as a result — the door flew off of the E30 they were driving and reached a height of about fifteen feet in the air before crashing back to Earth.

I wouldn’t have crashed that car. Give me the job. (Also, I wrote a fun article for Jalopnik about the whole thing. Experience matters, guys.)

I turned down the chance to drive a Nissan GT-R at Spa to take my kids to Disney World, and I deserve another shot at that

It’s true. Patrick offered me the chance to do a Jalopnik review of the GT-R, complete with a trip to Belgium to drive the damn thing at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, and I had to turn it down because I had booked a family vacation to see the Mouse at the same time. We don’t often get those types of drive opps at TTAC, so I need to become the EIC of Jalopnik so I can take all sorts of needlessly expensive press trips. After all, that’s really what automotive journalism is about. (It rained during that Spa event, anyway, and writers weren’t allowed to go over 80 mph. So, in hindsight, I lucked out by not going. Still.)

I can make my case for being Jalopnik EIC in less than 1,000 words

Most of the shit written at Jalopnik lately is way too long and wordy. Boom.