Driving Emotion

Posted on October 29th, 2002 in Opinion by Julian Edgar

Those of you who bother consulting the ‘About Us’ section on the menu to the left of this column will have realised that over the last four or so months there has been a number of changes in the roles of the editorial staffers.

After working as Editor for the last four years, I stepped down from that role to take over the editing of a proposed new Web Publications on-line technology magazine, The TechJournal. However, for a variety of reasons those staffing changes didn’t work out, so for the last month or so I have been back editing AutoSpeed full-time.

But things don’t stand still.

There are now going to be further changes, including an alteration in the publishing frequency of AutoSpeed. The proposal that AutoSpeed become a daily publication (an idea first mooted over 12 months ago) will now become a reality – in fact the change will occur within the next 6 weeks. Yes, that’s right – AutoSpeed will release a new article each day! Of course, if you’re happy looking at our new material on a weekly basis, you’ll be able to continue to do just that. Or, if you’d like a fill-up every day of the week – that’ll now be an option. Or anything in between.

That change in publishing frequency – and the resulting alteration in the way in which internal article production and organisation can be carried out – has meant that both Michael Knowling and I have moved to the roles of Major Contributors. Michael has also added to his list of responsibilities the task of answering your emails.

Driving Emotion

Posted on October 8th, 2002 in Opinion by Julian Edgar

The Reality and the Rest

AutoSpeed is now just on four years old.

Given that we devote nearly all of each issue to modified feature cars, technical stories – both OE and modification – and columns about car tweaking, it’s ironic that over those four years in many ways our greatest difficulties have been the result of our new car tests.

New car tests; they seem simple enough. Manufacturers have available fleets of press cars. These are loaned – one at a time – to motoring journalists who drive them for a week. Following that test, they write about the cars, highlighting the cars’ strengths and weaknesses, comparing them to their competition, and expressing these thoughts in clear and unambiguous prose. Depending on their current line-up, the car companies may get mostly good reviews, mostly bad reviews – or any mixture in between. But they cop it sweet, knowing that a journalist’s role is to represent their readers’ interests – the public good – and not to simply propagate the car company spin.

Believe all that? Well in that case you must also believe in fairies and the Loch Ness Monster… For nearly all motoring journalists – and so motoring publications as well – that above paragraph is absolute crap.