Mass Exodus
By noderel:
Boy was my internet been buzzing the past few weeks, with the info that Source something or other just had a mass firing. You don’t know Source? That’s the magazine distribution company that a few years back bought up so many of the automotive titles. And as is want for really big corporate companies, they are dumping magazine staff big time.
I keep in contact with nearly every facet of the media, so I was especially interested that a couple days ago Source canned something like 60 employees, at least two well known names in street rodding: Rob Fortier (Rod & Custom) and Eric Geisert, who did photo and writing work for several titles, including Street Rodder. Some mention of mag titles being axed also, but no confirm on this yet.
No big deal to you? Well, you are way wrong there, bucko. As you know, I am no fan of corporate America, definitely not corporate media. Too much emphasis in the corporate world is placed on the spreadsheet bottom line and not enough, ever, on the reader/enthusiast line. So, the first blip in any corporate cost cutting exercise is to attack the reader. Sadly, corporate thinks that supporters are dime a dozen, and that those supporters are idiots!
Anyway, how this affects you is quite direct. Instance: You grow to like a particular magazine or electronic message board. You like the content, and the way it is presented. You get to know that bit of information source as something, someone personal. You grow to trust it, to take it into your personal space as a friend. And you begin to rely on it. Kind of like the small town grocer or hardware who is suddenly replaced by The Big Box. Who can you ask for advice in The Big Box? Certainly not the corporate bean counter.
So, this is especially pertinent in the current climate of irreplaceable media veterans. This continual pruning of the media tree has failed to create a steady flow of replacement editors and writers who are savvy on automotive subjects, to the point that the once-newcomers have become the old heads that are now being chopped off. With no new heads being grown. The result is that you, the enthusist consumer, is being ever more increasingly left to drift without source of entertainment or information. A kind of modern day dark ages.
To be sure, history proves that nature abhors a vacuum, and eventually corporate greed and expediency will dwindle. Until the point where the cycle will inevitably produce another era of consumer fed demand. Already we see this with electronic media taking up where the print media has fallen asunder. Yet, there is much work for the modern enthusiast media to fill the widening yaw of consumer need.
Where the print media has gone astray is too much misguided emphasis on advertising revenue (seemingly immediate) versus consumer loyalty (long term). The result is that we, the hot rod enthusiasts, are shortchanged with magazine articles that do nothing but show how to use an advertiser product and ignore innate hot rodder talent. After all, this talent is what created that advertiser product in the first place.
The bottom line is quite simple. If the corporate mindset is entirely on immediate profits, then that entity will drift into oblivion. We need good media, folks, and we need it to be innovative and sustained. Print and electronic, we need it all!