Jason and Eddie, they're always ready

To pull the wool over a sucker's eyes, that is

(Note: the article that was supposed to go out today has been delayed so I could talk about this topic in a timely fashion. Come back tomorrow for Made In The USA: Thousand-Dollar Pen Comparison! — jb)

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have a moment of your respect for Eddie Alterman, who is certainly the most effectively intelligent person in the autojourno game? You probably don’t realize this, but Eddie has likely made more money, and enjoyed more influence, over the past ten years than anyone else in the traditional side of the business. He has survived purges, has been “demoted” in ways that paid him more, and has occasionally managed to completely disappear from the public eye — all the while either maintaining or expanding his control at Hearst.

To see or meet him, you wouldn’t think he’s an autowriter at all, certainly not in the traditional mold. He’s indifferent with a pen, no kind of driver, and I’m pretty sure that my just-turned-13-year-old son could beat him in a street fight. Yet he runs the show at C/D and R&T with an iron fist. He’s the Gus Fring of automotive journalism; while your humble author was running around the world winning races, setting ‘Ring times, and seeing new and different kinds of girls in their birthday suits, Eddie was making serious bank and enshrining himself in a vast media empire, usually hiding himself behind people who would appeal to the readers — L. Webster, step up! — or the suits — S. Silke Carty, oh no!

You get the idea. He’s maybe not an intellectual or man of letters, but he is smart and slippery and he will be making $300k or more a year long after your humble author has been reduced to a Wal-Mart greeter. For proof of this, look no further than the above-excerpted exchange from Reddit, sent to me by my pal Gene.

…look at the amount of OEM advertising in your most recent car magazine. Carmakers don’t have much leverage.

Why, this sounds perfectly reasonable and you can check for yourself! I have to grudgingly tilt my fedora at such a compelling paragraph. Except it’s not true, of course; not remotely so. The idea that automakers manipulate the magazines through advertising is a tale as old as time, and often correct — but in 2022, they have more powerful and subtle ways to do it. And it’s ironic that Jason Cammisa is being discussed in the above subreddit or whatever, because it was his intervention on behalf of a major car manufacturer ten years ago that helped open my eyes to how the business truly works.

Let’s start by going back to the era when automakers were serious advertisers in the “buff books”. In those days, a manufacturer might occasionally pull their advertising to make a point about an unfavorable article — but if you count the ads from any issue of C/D in the Eighties or Nineties, you’ll find just as many ads for non-automotive brands as for automakers.

Before the Internet, before the influencers, before the mommybloggers, the buff books were the only effective avenue to reach a bunch of reasonably wealthy and thoroughly automotive-obsessed men, so they were never short of advertising in the first place. General Motors wants to pull its ads for the Citation? Ford will be happy to fill the gap. If they aren’t, Marlboro will be. Selling ads into car magazines was easy, which was why there were so many car magazines on the newsstand.

That doesn’t mean that the writers and editors weren’t swayed by advertiser money. In particular, Motor Trend was notorious for supposedly selling its XX Of The Year awards to the highest bidder, an allegation made openly by David E. Davis in his column at Automobile. (It’s at the end of his lament regarding the closing of London Chop House.) Nota bene, however, that Cammisa thoughtfully places the “bribery era” before his time at the magazine. It’s my experience that individual Motor Trend people are always willing to admit that the magazine took money to call winners before they happened to arrive at the magazine, the same way that Motor Trend rarely mentioned a car’s significant faults until they were testing its replacement.

Then you had those “Special Advertising Sections” which went a long way towards keeping the magazine slush funds in the black, of course. Sometimes an individual writer would get paid serious money for appearing in a Special Advertising Section — Jean Jennings nee Lindamood was especially good at that, as I recall.

If the old-timers who brought me up to speed can be believed, however, the ad money was never the primary driver of autowriter compliance. Rather, it was the combination of a social scene and a revolving door. I’ve written a lot about this so I’ll just hit the high points. Most autowriters never talk to their readers, but they spend week after week in the company of fellow autowriters, manufacturer reps, and friendly PR people. The pressure to conform in those circles is intense, to put it mildly.

In my early years as a blogger, before people got a genuine sense of how contrary, unpleasant, and combative I would turn out to be, I sat in on a lot of dinners and cocktail parties with the autowriter crowd. It’s fair to say that most of them have simmering contempt for the people who read them, and when they talk about the readers at all it’s only to quote the dumbest possible YouTube or Facebook comment, as if one illiterate teenager shit-blitzing his keyboard at 2am is somehow representative of the readership in general.

Demonizing the readers as idiots or hicks or whatever makes it that much easier to be good friends with the PR people, who control your access to all those sweet overseas flights and five-star hotels. They’ll make sure you have a 7-Series to park in your driveway for the neighbors to see, and an Aston Martin to drive to your high school reunion.

(Sidebar: I want to publicly recognize and kinda-sorta thank Aston Martin for calling up Hagerty PR earlier this year and demanding that I never attend one of their press events or drive one of their cars. Small loss, because Aston Martins are generally the worst cars in their class and the whole brand has become a weird 007 cosplay jerkoff exercise ever since it was sold to the sovereign wealth funds. The official reason for the request was that I made other autowriters nervous and fearful by my very presence. My fifty-year-old, oft-crippled, usually-sleepy presence.)

Beyond the chance to live the life of a millionaire on $62,000 a year, the automakers have another carrot to dangle, and that’s the revolving door. Go look at the LinkedIn of any reasonably venerable and successful autowriter, and you’ll see that they’ve done stints with PR agencies, ad agencies, and sometimes the manufacturers themselves. Example: one of Eddie Alterman’s proteges, a rather undistinguished fellow named Stu Fowle who toiled for him at the completely unlamented Motive Magazine, is now a senior PR person for GMC and Buick. That’s a nice job, particularly for someone who crashed press cars rather more often than he managed to turn a cultured phrase.

Alright. Those are the carrots. What and where are the sticks, and what got Jason so fired up on behalf of his very good friends at Porsche that he moved heaven and earth to make sure he edited one particular sentence out of my “Accelerated Depreciation” article? Reader, I’m glad you asked.