An interesting ABC TV Media Watch this week  on the future of journalism. (See it here.)

I guess it’s particularly fascinating to me, as AutoSpeed this year reaches the ripe old age of ten. For close to a decade (and so two-thirds of the time the Web has existed!) my full-time job as a journalist and editor has been working for this specialist website.

These days, like probably many of you, I read all my ‘newspapers’ on line and watch most of my ‘TV’ online.  (Inverted commas because they’re not really ‘newspapers’ and ‘TV’ are they?)

So what do you think of the future of newspapers (and of course, by implication, magazines)? And what do you think of the very important point made by the presenter that quality journalism needs a financial model that in the past has relied on the huge advertising revenues generated by newspaper classifieds?

One point that I think the program missed is that the breadth and reach of the web allows far narrower targeting of audiences, so making viable media that would otherwise not exist. I am quite sure that if the audience for AutoSpeed was limited to just a country like Australia, it would be too small to make AutoSpeed viable.

But what is the future of newspapers and magazines? What forms will (and should) automotive and popular journalism take?

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I love modifying cars but I hate doing car maintenance. Even something as simple as an oil change I despise: I sure wouldn’t last long working as a mechanic.

But every now and again I need to do what I hate: maintenance.

In the most recent case it was a noise that developed in the engine bay of my Peugeot 405 diesel. It started, I thought, after I repaired a leak in the plastic power steering fluid reservoir. The fluid level had been dropping and then I noticed a crack near the outlet pipe. I took a punt and used a soldering iron and filler rod (cable ties!) to plastic weld the crack closed – the repair worked perfectly.

With new fluid in the reservoir, everything seemed fine.

But then a whine started up in the engine bay. Initially it was just audible, but it got louder and louder. It varied with engine revs, being just able to be heard at idle but being very loud indeed at 3-4000 rpm.

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As many of you will know, on my recumbent pedal trike I use a Firestone airbag for rear springing. This air spring has major advantages over other springing approaches but as it has little intrinsic damping, external damping is needed.

The rear damper is an ex-R1 Yamaha motorcycle steering damper. This is an unusual design for a motorbike steering damper in that it runs an external passage connecting the sides of the piston. The piston is a loose fit in the bore. The damping action in standard form is provided by the oil passing through the bypass passage, and also making its way past the loose piston. (I assume that the steering damper can be tuned in its action by placing restrictors in the bypass passage.)

To make the steering damper suitable for use as a suspension damper, I modify a plug in the external passage and insert in this passage a one-way valve. This allows free-er flow of oil on bump and more restriction to flow on rebound. Bump damping is therefore provided by the oil flowing in the bypass passage around the open valve and also around the piston, and rebound damping by the oil flow past the piston only.

This gives the desired asymmetric bump/rebound damping.

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Back when the Holden VE Commodore was released, I was very disappointed that styling clearly dominated engineering in a way that I thought reflected the worst excesses of the past.

I wrote:

Quoted in Go-Auto E-News, designer Mike Simcoe had this to say about the exterior:

“It’s good, confident design. It’s well proportioned and it pushes quality to a level that we’ve never seen before. The interior package for VT was king of that in the market here – and this car continues that. The volume efficiency of the package – that’s the exterior volume to interior size – is just as aggressive as VT was. We made a big song and dance back then about that. And this car is the same.

“The track is a little bit wider with this new architecture, so from the ground up we’ve been able to put the wheels wider on the car.

“It’s an international design. You can’t say ‘European’ any more, because there’s no ‘European design’, or ‘Japanese design’ – it’s a truly international design in its form language. It’s genuinely a rear-wheel drive proportioned car which is something we hadn’t been able to push as hard in the past. And it’s much more formal. The form language that’s on the car is internal Holden. We’ve been trying to do something like this seriously for a long time.”

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It’s happened only a few times in my life, and each time it’s been a salutary experience.

One occasion I can remember is a long time ago. I was in junior secondary school and was heavily into solar energy. I’d constructed my own solar water heaters, solar pie warmers and other bits of gear. I knew about meridian altitude, I knew about flat plate collectors and thermal mass.

I’d also read all the books I could get my hands on that dealt with solar heating and knew inside-out the (handful) of books on the topic in the school library.

In fact I was pretty smug about my level of knowledge and understanding.

Then a new book came into the library. I can even remember its size and shape – it was a book long in landscape direction and had soft covers. It was also quite thick.

I remember I picked this book and started looking through it with little interest. After all, I already knew everything about solar energy…

But, all of a sudden, I went very quiet and became intent. I was just about to discover a whole new world of solar energy complexity and relevance; my learning on the subject was going to progress hugely.

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All major companies and organisations use Public Relations employees. These people, effectively employed to put the greatest positive spin possible on anything to do with their company or organisation, send out an endless stream of press releases.

Ten or twenty of these press releases lob into my email in-box every day of the week, telling me all about the wonderful things the companies have been doing.

The trouble is, most of these press releases are just rubbish. In fact, the vast majority are rubbish.

I truly don’t know how so many PR people keep their jobs. As part of my Graduate Diploma in Journalism, I did a compulsory unit of Public Relations studies. (In some bizarre manner that I will never understand, in some people’s eyes, Public Relations and Journalism are allied trades. I fail to see any connection whatsoever.) But together with my journalism experience of something like 15 years, I am quite well qualified to be a PR practitioner.

But I’d rather dig holes.

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Perhaps everyone has already seen these videos, but I found them very interesting, to say the least.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=k3ygYUYia9I

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=abAG-MCskPQ

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Regular readers will know of my admiration for the Toyota Prius.

That’s not just because I own a first series NHW10 model (currently off the road with a worn-out high voltage battery) but primarily because of the commercial success the Prius has had.

Simply put, in terms of actual impact on the market, the Prius stands head and shoulders above any ‘alternative’ car that has been sold in perhaps the last 75 years.

It therefore behoves anyone enthusing an alternative automotive technology – whether that’s biodiesel, LPG, pure electric cars or anything else – to know the Prius inside-out. To know its equipment level, its warranty, its real-world fuel economy, its emissions performance, its new and used prices, and its technology.

Like it or not, the Prius sets the current benchmark.

Nope, not necessarily in any one specific area – emissions, fuel economy, driveline technology, control electronics or even high voltage battery technology – but in a total package that has been successfully sold to the public for a decade.

And, because of that timescale, it is a car that is now available very cheaply second-hand.

That might all seem obvious – but it is certainly not to some.

I recently had long phone discussions with a man very enthusiastic about DIY biodiesel. He runs seminars on the topic, played an instrumental part in developing a home biodiesel plant, and is highly educated. But his knowledge of the Prius (and other hybrids) is poor indeed.

With regard to hybrids, his website contains errors of fact and makes some statements that could only be described as wild scaremongering.

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The tipping point came when Al Gore released his new documentary: I Was Wrong. Completely repudiating An Inconvenient Truth, Gore showed in minute detail how flawed his previous views were.

The world was not actually warming, he noted,  instead it was cooling – and cooling in a way that was very likely to result in greater crop yields, more favourable rainfall patterns and political stability.

And the cause? From his documentary we learned for the first time that CO2 was proving in fact to be hugely beneficial. The greater CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were counteracting the altered reflectivity of Earth’s surface caused by widespread urban development and farming practices.

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