Feb. 13, 2006 - New Media v. Old

I was reading Peter DeLorenzo’s appropriately categorized “rant” against the car magazine business the other day at http://www.autoextremist.com/page2.shtml#Rant and felt compelled to write a little something myself.  Visiting the autoextremist.com site is fun every now and again, not for any pithy insights into the auto industry, or cogent arguments but for how the various authors-- and Peter being the biggest culprit-- can take idle gossip and spin it into a credible sounding story.

But I digress; back to the rant against car magazines.  He argues that the ability of the web to instantly disseminate information around the globe necessarily makes print media obsolete.  He goes on to say the cozy relationship that the manufacturers have with the big print media outlets has castrated the irreverent writing of yore.  While I can somewhat agree with the latter in regards to new model reviews, I take exception with the former.  If car magazines were only about automotive news, scoops and daily press releases they would have been done in by newspapers and weeklies long ago.  Sure monthly magazines print spy photos and scoops long after the internet has beamed the information to legions of automotive junkies around the world, but that misses a big part of the magazine’s mission.  

The monthly magazines offer considered insight into the products made by the automotive industry.  Full on tests and reviews of new models do not need to be broadcast instantly.  Nor do travelogues, interviews, criticism, or analysis.  All of these categories within automotive journalism benefit from a reasoned approach to assembling, interpreting and presenting the information.  I have found that often times the immediacy of information availability on the internet has lead to a loss of the big picture.  Instant information alone cannot provide the proper context for understanding.  And that doesn’t even take into consideration the propensity of internet information being inaccurate.

Witness how real time reports from the front lines of the war on terror often illicit knee jerk reactions from the public and politicians alike.  Without a reasoned consideration of the facts, the information fog of war distorts the reality on the ground. In a much more trivial way this fog can distort what is the truth in the automotive world as well.   

Those who embrace new technology often times predict the immediate demise of the old way, yet historically some things just refuse to be replaced.  Just as television did not replace movies, VCRs and DVDs did not replace the movie theater, and videos did not kill the radio star, the internet has not, and will not completely replace the newspaper, magazine or book.