Forums & The Changing World of Automotive Media

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is being published as part of CorvetteForum’s participation in the No Show No Problem virtual tradeshow currently being put on by our colleagues over at RacingJunk. Make sure to check out these pieces as well.

• Auto Journalism is Going Virtual, and Also Doomed
• The End of the V8 is Nigh, but the Corvette’s Future Remains Bright & Bloody Fast
• The Next 15 Years of Motoring

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The automotive media world has changed a great deal over the past 25 years. In 1995, if you wanted to read a review of a new model or coverage of the Detroit Auto Show, you had to buy a magazine. The growth of automotive news websites led enthusiasts away from print publications, but many of the big magazines were quick to establish an online presence.

However, the introduction of automotive enthusiast forums (ahem, like CorvetteForum) has represented the biggest shift in the world of automotive media.

Websites that were once little more than a bunch of gearheads talking about their favorite brand or model have evolved into their own form of popular media, combining the close-knit feeling of the forum community with the information that readers could traditionally only get from print publications.

The Rise of Forum Media

I was fortunate enough to be heavily involved with the forum world in the early days, having started and run some of the largest automotive communities around the year 2000. When automotive forums first became popular, all of the content came from threads and discussions posted by members of the community. Many discussions focusing on news began with a member of the community sharing an actual photograph of a magazine article, but as the big car magazines improved their online presence, members began sharing links to the websites of the large print publications. As the websites of magazines grew, automotive retailers began investing money in advertising on those magazines’ websites.

While the websites of magazines were the top destination for automotive advertisers, the rapid growth of users and daily traffic made forums similarly attractive for retailers looking to reach their target audience. A key issue for forum owners back then was that all of those links to magazine websites were sending customers elsewhere, so rather than simply sharing news stories from magazines and “traditional” media outlets, forum owners began writing their own unique new content. Having access to large numbers of enthusiasts allowed forum owners to capture more unique content from local events that were too small and too frequent for the big outlets to notice.

This connection to the community also allowed writers from the forum to feature vehicles and members of the targeted group. No longer did you have to buy a monthly magazine to read about a cool, modified version of your favorite car when you could see 5 of those features a month for free at a forum. Best of all, the nature of the community allowed you, as a fan of a specific vehicle, to easily talk to the owners of those featured rides.

As an early forum writer, I provided coverage for a wide variety of events, including motorsports and car shows. The next step was to gain media access to the major international auto shows so that we could bring our communities the news, rather than relying on links from magazine websites. By 2006, the network of forums that I helped run gathered tens of millions of page views per month.

We had similar, if not better, traffic than the big magazine websites, so I applied to a major American auto show for media access.

I was rejected.

So I called the media office to see if I could plead my case. I explained that I oversaw a large network of enthusiasts with tens of thousands of daily users and millions of monthly page views. The reply was the working world equivalent of “you’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” The man on the phone laughed and said, “It doesn’t matter how much traffic you have – you aren’t a journalist, you are an enthusiast.”

Sadly, he was right. I wasn’t a journalist. I was an accountant and enthusiast who wrote at night while overseeing the forums.

Smaller auto shows would provide things like free tickets, but in the mid-2000s, the larger auto shows – Detroit, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles – were all disinterested in considering even the largest forum network as part of the media. As a result, I would pay to attend industry days when applicable, or I would simply attend the big auto shows on public days. This would continue for a few years, with the “old guard” mentality focusing on the shrinking number of traditional media outlets as forum popularity grew.

Mind you, this was around the time of a recession and the collapse of the magazine industry in the late-2000s, so while print publications were dying, forums were booming.

The Automakers See the Light

While traditional media outlets and the folks who ran the big auto shows kept on thinking that forums were nothing but a bunch of kids playing on the internet, automakers took note of the rise of enthusiast communities. They began participating and advertising on the forums, along with inviting forum writers to attend media drive events.

At first, forum writers were typically grouped together into their own unique wave of testing, but as time went on, writers from DodgeForum, CorvetteForum, and Honda-Tech found themselves as the same media testing events as the big outlets.

When most of the automakers began recognizing forums as key media outlets, the big auto shows eventually followed suit. By 2010, forum writers could apply for media credentials as the biggest auto shows in the world, confident that they would be admitted. It took roughly 10 years to establish our place in the automotive media world, but after a decade of being rejected, writers from the top automotive forums were admitted access to many of the same events as writers from the biggest magazines.

Of course, there are still plenty of links to magazine articles shared across the forums, but it is rare that any major news story which applies to the interests of a community has to come from an outside source. Major forums had writers to provide auto show coverage, first drive event coverage, and even new car reviews, allowing forum owners to keep much of that traffic in-house.

Continued Media Growth

Once forum writers were being accepted by most major shows and automakers, those community websites evolved into something greater than just a message board with news stories posted as threads. Forums established front page sections that read like the most popular automotive new blogs. While the magazines continued to push forward with their traditional coverage, forum writers offered enthusiast communities a mix of the traditional coverage and smaller, grassroots-type events.

In many cases, forums began the go-to output for diehard enthusiasts who appreciated the one-stop-shopping of the forums, creating a bigger hole in the armor of large media outlets.

No longer do enthusiasts of a large community need to wait for a large magazine to publish a first drive review of a hot, new car on their website. Instead, those enthusiasts can read a similar first drive review that was written by a member of their community. That access to the folks covering the automotive world helped to bolster the connection between the forum and its members, leading to see outbound links being shared in the community.

The Future is Bright

We are living in unusual times, where many people don’t trust large media outlets. Also, while Facebook is the clear leader in social media traffic, Facebook’s choice to censor so much of what is posted gives forums a defined advantage.

Forums continue to present a place for car guys and girls to interact and get their news, free of the biased input of the mass media or the excessive censorship of large social media networks. As a result, as enthusiasts avoid large media outlets and Facebook, forums continue to be trusted, friendly sources of information.

After all, many forums still rely on writers who were originally part of their community. Enthusiasts appreciate the fact that many forum writers are “one of them”, and those writers can easily be contacted while large media outlets are typically nameless, faceless entities.

While Facebook is busy playing politics and wrestling with the government, and magazines are focused on optimizing profits and staying afloat, forums continue to focus on what matters most – the automotive world. In an ever-changing world, forum owners, administrators, writers, and members have stayed true to what made these communities so popular to begin with. They offer vastly more technical knowledge than any traditional media outlet while also featuring much of the same news that you will find on the websites of the biggest print publications.

As many automotive enthusiasts stop buying magazines and log off of Facebook for good, their favorite forum community provides a slice of normalcy that has only gotten better over the past 20 years.

Photographs: General Motors

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