event mechanics

Online business models. I hadn’t thought about ‘business’ at all except in a critical (but not always negative) sense until about a year ago. Here is an abstract to a paper I have in the works. However, I’ve been thinking about business models for the magazines since I’ve been involved in developing a new online presence for some of them. This post is the result of some of the thinking I have been doing on the subject and has been in the works for a while now (several weeks). I’ve been thinking about it constantly but have little time to actually work on it.

I work at Express Media Group, which publishes a number of niche-market enthusiast titles. EMG is currently developing its online presence and is working on ways to successfully integrate print and online publishing. As well as working as a Production Editor, I’ve been involved in developing some of the websites for the motoring titles. The first new website up is that for Zoom magazine.

We have a massive advertising campaign starting tomorrow that requires the other websites to be up and I am waiting on our overworked web team to finish them. I look forward to seeing the results.

I’ve been carrying out research in my own time to think about new business models that integrate print and online publishing. I have no official role in this at EMG (yet), rather I have been treating it as an extension of my PhD research on enthusiasm in modified-car culture where I looked at the relation between the enthusiast media and the scene over a 30 year period.

I used philosophical concepts to examine the composition of power relations in the organisation of the scene (dispositif) and how this has changed a number of times over the time period (an event-based conception of history). Now it seems my research is going to be the most relevant if it is developed in a simple set of critical tools for understanding legacy business models.

The general character of these legacy business models is mostly well understood. The current public workshops being hosted by the FTC are working on the issues and problems of “how the Internet has affected journalism”. The FTC has posted a Staff Discussion Draft paper that explores some of the points raised over the course of several months worth of hearings. In the first few pages of the paper (2-3) the FTC outlines the general problem with legacy business models faced by all print-based publishers. I have extracted the three main points below:

1. Newspapers’ revenues from advertising have fallen approximately 45% since 2000. For example, classified advertising accounted for $19.6 billion in revenue for newspapers in 2000, $10.2 billion in 2008, and is estimated to be only $6.0 billion in 2009.
2. With the advent of the Internet, advertisers have many more ways in which to reach consumers, including, for example, through a marketer’s own website or through topical websites that relate to the products that an advertiser wants to sell (e.g., a soccer blog for soccer equipment). Search engines also provide sites for advertising related to particular search queries.
3. Although some types of online advertising (e.g., advertising targeted to a consumer’s known interests) can generate greater revenue than other types (e.g., banner ads), the vast supply of online sites for advertising reduces the amount that an online news site can charge for advertising at its site. This means that online advertising typically generates much less revenue than print advertising (often described as “digital dimes” as compared to the dollars generated by print ads). It appears unlikely that online advertising revenues will ever be sufficient to replace the print advertising revenues that newspapers previously received.

First year journalism students are taught about the ‘news hole’ well in the actual publishing business there is often an ‘advertising hole’ as well. As more advertisers have moved online to directly target the niche market enthusiast communities that the advertiser services, there are less advertisers looking at print-based advertising. Of course, this is a generalisation as there are many enthusiast communities, of mostly older enthusiasts, that have not gone online.

All is not lost, however. There are other ways to sell advertising beyond simple ‘display’-type advertising. Dan Blank has a good post up from over a year ago on different sources of revenue for online media publishers.

The main goal here is for editorial teams to be pursuing fewer standalone articles that rely solely on CPM ads, and look to more integrated packages that build many products from a single effort.

For the last six years or so I have long looked at this from the flip side. Media events assembled from a series of inter-related texts. Often these texts are assembled around a non-media product, so a product is doubled as its media-based simulacra. It was the basis of my work I carried out on exchange to Sweden during my PhD looking at media events not as the media coverage of an event, but the event produced through the media.

In social media circles posting the same material across a number of channels is called ‘content leverage’. So a Facebook post about a blog post describing a Youtube video is Tweeted. At EMG I have been working on producing media content from single opportunities that can be distributed across a number of media channels. So far the best example of this was an ECU guide in Zoom issue 147 that is currently on the stands. I have several hours of video that I shot and I am currently editing to be posted to our Youtube channel and posted to our blog. Here is an example:

The real problem with thinking about new business models for niche/enthusiast media that integrate online and print elements is that most of the current discussion about the state of print media has been about ‘hard news’. Niche/enthusiast media and ‘hard news’ work following different journalistic models of content production. For example, Blank writes:

An underlying theme in many of these is to create evergreen content whose shelf life is longer than a news article – with multiple segments that extend the ways you can market it and sell it. Focusing on business needs beyond the cycle of “breaking news” may diminish the reliance on the single revenue model of advertising.

We already do this to a certain extent, but we are going to be doing much more of this style of content production and it is going to be a real challenge for editorial teams working under increasingly tight deadlines (we make a magazine per week on average!). To make this possible Blank has two suggestions:

1) Editorial teams mapping out a product roadmap, not just an editorial calendar.
2) Editorial teams working more closely with their sales teams to come up with these ideas, and ensure that the sales dept has this information with enough time to test the market, and ideally, sell these products.

Working closer to advertising sales teams is not a problem, the other challenge, beyond deadlines, is getting a sense of what is happening in the scene. There is so much activity nowadays that to track it all, even just all the online activity, for the scene in Australia is a full-time role.

So where to go from here? I am currently rewriting some of my PhD research for a draft paper about legacy media business models for niche/enthusiast media.

The recent Toyota recall is more about a panic over the forthcoming fully-automated automobility than it is about actual threat, as I argue in a new piece over at New Matilda.

A recent series of posts on the self-proclaimed PR and social marketing blog Mumbrella on the relation between Twitterer’s personal beliefs and their respective professional PR and social marketing personae indicates an interesting way that anxieties around mixing of public and private lives online are still manifest.

The first post was by (whom I assume to be) Tim Burrowes posting on his ‘personal’ section, called Mumbo, of his Mumbrella site on an exchange between a Twitterer, Natalie Swainston, and the SMH trollumnist, Miranda Devine. Burrowes apparently believes the exchange between Swainston and Devine was noteworthy, if not newsworthy, because he perceived that it was an “intriguing insight” into the tensions between “journo-PR relations”.

The second post was in the actual ‘news’ section of Mumbrella, perhaps because the second post was actually about a Twitterer tweeting something of professional consequence (unlike Swainston’s effort): a Twitter employed by a company that has commercial relation with a second company was critical of the environmental impact of the practices of the second company. Again, at stake was Burrowes view that “intemperate tweeting has caused issues for PRs”.

Burrowes makes it even clearer what is at stake in these online exchanges that he perceives trouble public-private lives in a comment to another blog post on the topic:

The problem with that suggested policy [of separate personal and professional online personae] is that it’s naive about how journalists would interpret someone’s personal vs professional persona.

“I’m tweeting in a personal capacity” may be a disclaimer, but it’s not a cloak of invisibility.

If what you say is relevant to your day job and you are identifiable, then you need to treat Twitter as you would any other broadcast medium.

If you don’t want your tweets public, then either protect them, don’t do it in your own name, or don’t tweet stuff that could get you into trouble.

The contradiction of course is that Burrowes is discounting the possibility of separate professional and personal personae for normal Twitterers, but when it comes to Miranda Devine’s trollumnist practice he assumes such a separation, i.e. as suggested by his aside in his first post “(although Dr Mumbo has always considered her to be a satirical creation)”.

So what is going on here? Why is this politically and socially conservative self-disciplined muzzling of one’s online persona being advocated and valorised?

An overly critical perspective would see Burrowes and like-minded PR and marketing types to be prostituting their self-image for the benefit of their clients and their professional interests. The expectations of the ‘self’ are literally collapsed into the expectations of the client. Of course, critical perspectives of marketing and associated industries have long banged-on about how soulless the industry is. This, I think, you could describe as the worst case interpretation.

Support for this interpretation comes from Burrowes treating the two examples above as the same. In the first case the Twitterer had no professional connection whatsoever to Devine. In the second case the Twitterer was actually being critical of a client of his employer. Burrowes has collapsed the two different events into being examples of a general relation between personal and professional Tweet personae. One’s ‘public’ persona must to be disciplined so as to conform to any and all possible expectations of an imaginary client that could potentially be anyone. Therefore, ‘personal’ views – such as those on ‘public’ issues regarding politics or the state of the environment – must be kept under wraps and secret so as not to offend the sensibilities of this potentially-anyone client.

Although there may be some substance to view that marketing professionals are soulless prostitutes, especially when relatively minor skirmishes in the culture wars played out on Twitter are ‘reported’ as noteworthy, if not newsworthy, I prefer to read Burrowes’s anxiety around the public-private distinction as a way to grapple with the pressure of this tendency towards becoming an example of the worse case scenario. Burrowes is actually trying to find a way to maintain a sense of ‘self’ while under pressure to become a mere functionary expression of the imaginary client’s expectation.

It is a very good example of the way that people working within a given profession attempt to grapple with the ethical quandaries of having to satisfy a client’s expectations while maintaining one’s personal political passions. Of course I am not in marketing (the only thing I could market would be the revolution!) but I do know a thing or two about enthusiasm and what it means to mobilise people’s passions. Perhaps a more effective approach rather than a conservative and reactionary separation of personal and professional, to the explicit detriment of the personal, one should seek a better integration of the personal and the professional. Rather than PR and social marketers being disciplined to be worthy of clients, maybe PR and social marketing types should pick and choose clients that are worthy of their talents?

I have had an article in the works for a while now where I have tried to address how to write articles for enthusiast magazines with the example of enthusiast magazines that service modified-car culture. The problem I was having was with how to position it. I have some great material derived from my PhD and the many dozen articles I have written (I have written 55 freelance articles this year, about 30 in the years previous, and easily over 100 as a staff writer). Now I have figured out that the best way for me to pitch this in the opening paragraph is to compare it to the introductory scholarship on writing for the news media.

These are the core analytical points I wanted to convey in this opening first section:

1. Writing for enthusiast media is not the same as writing for news media.
2. The enthusiast media is designed to tap into an enthusiasm and use it as a resource; it is primarily an affective discourse. News media is primarily meant to be free of affect and tends towards an ideal of ‘objectivity’.
3. If the point of news media journalism is to convey the Who, What, Why, Where, When and How (5 Ws and 1 H method) in the lead sentence, then enthusiast media attempts to hook the reader by inciting a particular affective response.
4. The news media attempts to represent the world so the reader can implicate it in their own respective lives; there is some truth to the ‘hyperdermic model’ of media transmission. However, the enthusiast media attempts to implicate the reader in the event of enthusiasm being reported on.

The second section then goes on to demonstrate what is required to be able to write in the affective mode.

1. An understanding and appreciation of the enthusiasm is required.
2. To understand enthusiasm means understanding the challenges faced by an enthusiast. Here I am unsure if I should offer a brief account of the post-Kantian conception of enthusiasm developed in my phd? It is by engaging with challenges that enthusiast bodies are mobilised. Within modified-car culture, a co-enthusiast will ‘read’ a given car in terms of the challenges it inculcates. This demonstrates the capacity and skill of the car’s owner to ‘rise to the challenge’.
3. Understanding the enthusiasm does not simply mean knowing about the objects of enthusiasm or even only the practices of enthusiasm. Within modified-car culture a car is not merely an object to be incorporated into the ego to facilitate gendered production of identity (hegemonic masculinity model), it is a topology of challenges that enthusiasts ‘read’ and confer respect accordingly. The aquisition of know-how is a product of practices that engage with challenges. There is a correlation between know-how and respect within the scene.
4. The job of the enthusiast media journalist is to represent how the enthusiast engaged with a given challenge. The affects of enthusiasm are expressed through this process of rising to the challenge, such as frustration, confusion, trickiness (like ‘smartness’), satisfaction, patience and determination.

The third section discusses the relation between an enthusiast magazine and the given enthusiast scene.
1. A given magazine covers a certain niche market which more often than not encapsulates a subculture within a scene.
2. The magazine is in a relation with enthusiasts and commercial interests. Within modified-car culture the commercial interests are mostly workshops and performance parts suppliers, but also includes event promoters.
3. Coverage of the scene is a media event that seeks to translate the affects of a given event through enthusiast discourse in such a way as to implicate the reader in the broader affective mobilisations of the scene.
4. The content of the scene selected for coverage in a magazine is explicitly valorised, through publication, as being worthy of appearing in the magazine.
5. The political economy dimension to enthusiast magazine coverage of the scene is that coverage is shaped by commercial imperatives of ‘keeping the advertisers happy’.
6. Unlike normal media this is not that much a problem in that those elements selected from commercial interests are also worthy of being valorised. The function of the enthusiast media is not to change the enthusiast-determined heirarchies of value within the scene, but to segment and select portions of it according to the commercial imperatives.

The conclusion points out that niche-market media that services a given enthusiasm is the way of the future for media companies that are coming to terms with shifting from being print publishers to being online publishers. In Australia, just as many other national contexts with a developed media ecology, there are many different enthusiast media publications that target and service many different enthusiasms.

Monetizing Enthusiasm: The Missed Opportunity of Social Media and Car Enthusiast Magazines

Abstract: The publishing industry that services the scene of modified-car culture in Australia has largely missed the boat when it came to moving from being a once profitable commercial print industry into a profitable social media enterprise. This paper explores the reasons for this failure in the context of the last 30 years of modified-car culture and the enthusiast media industry that developed around it. A number of possible approaches are proposed for monetizing enthusiasm through social media that should be useful for other enthusiast scenes.

When post-structuralist marxists become capitalist.

My heart is well and truly broken.

I heard some of today’s Hack on the radio and I was very unimpressed. It was on the issue of whether or not Australia should become a republic. The section I listened to was painful. They had ‘young’ people on the show being asked questions about whether they think Australia should be a republic. The discussion turned into an interrogation of why a young woman was questioning the relevance of the republic debate for her. One of the other discussants misrecognised this as apathy, ie that she didn’t care. It is not that she didn’t care — what would be the point of her appearing on the radio if she didn’t care? — rather it was because she was trying to figure out, and rightly so, why she should care about the issue of whether or not Australia should become a republic.

The issue of the republic is one of the issues that belongs to the games of the political classes. Most people don’t care as it is not going to affect their lives in any direct way. The debate around the issue of whether or not Australia becomes a republic is one of the events that allows people who want to be ‘political’ to perform ‘politics’. There may not be any direct outcome in terms of changing the way the majority of Australians live their lives, but this is irrelevant when performing ‘politics’. ‘Politics’ is about staking out a position, mobilising points, forwarding an argument and combating opponents.

It means that Hack is doing a salutatory job at functioning as a ‘current affairs’ type news broadcast. There is nothing of consequence discussed, it merely serves as a platform for those interested in being ‘political’ to perform ‘politics’ in a strictly ideological fashion. The ‘politics’ is imaginary. It doesn’t matter, at least not to the lives of nearly every single young person in Australia.

Mainstream current affairs shows are similar in that they have their usual array of story themes that allows them to present to the audience the opportunity to (re)perform their own respective ideological beliefs. Media functions through ideology not by determining one’s beliefs but by allowing audiences the opportunity to mobilise themselves into action. They present part of a challenge the other part is presented by the audience as they mobilise themselves to engage with the challenge. Which is why the most one-eyed ideologue can be practically brainwashed to the point of not having a single thought that is their own and yet be the most active — that is, the most mobilised — member of the audience-citizenry. Or the stupidities of shock-jock radio, for example, are part of a solution to solving the problem of alienation by providing the lost with tools for facing the challenge of fitting in. They don’t tackle the cause of alienation, only providing a lulling panacea.

If Hack wants to mobilise their youthful audience in productive ways, then they need to isolate those challenges faced by young people. It seems simple enough, and I have heard plenty of Hack episodes and stories where they do exactly that. This nonsense about the republic is on a spectrum, however, one that I think the Hack producers need to be aware and avoid. Leave it for the heroes in the national papers as they write themselves into oblivion with the rest of the deadwood media.

I don’t want to be entirely critical, however. There would be little point to that. Here are some story ideas that may or may not be relevant, part of figuring out their relevance would be part of Hack being successful. They are merely examples.

1) Mobility issues. Living in NSW it is clear the state government is run by a bunch of self serving assholes, with the rest being weak fools who don’t have the strength to tell the career politicians to fuck off and then actually try to fix anything. There have been some excellent people in government, from what little knowledge I have of the matter, but they are few and far between. Public and personal transport is one of the biggest issues that young people face. If Hack wanted to be at all effective, then they should have a regular slot that discusses concrete problems and practical solutions. A certain suburb in a certain city or a town and how young people are enfranchised or disenfranchised by their access to mobility. The technical term for this is motility, the capacity for mobility.

2) Fun. Living in the suburbs, one is mostly subject to whatever ‘fun’ is available to you. There are limited options for ‘fun’ unless one goes into the ‘city’ or if you start acting up and creating your own ‘fun’ from whatever resources you have available, such as cars, drinking, drugs, television and the internet. How do people have fun? What resources do they available to them? Are they privileged or disadvantaged? What does this mean?

3) The function of education. A comparative analysis of different ways of being educated, everything from being ‘street smart’ to doing a PhD. What are the expected outcomes of such a course of action in one’s life? Provide actual real life examples of the sort of things that you should expect. Gone are the days where doing a science degree meant you did ‘science’ or doing law meant you became a lawyer and so on.

4) Everyday life of different parts of Australia. What does it mean to grow up in FNQ compared to the inner-west if Sydney to the northern suburbs of Perth to a town in Tasmania and so on. In so many ways we are all raised to expect to experience everyday life in certain ways, but what is the reality?

Traffic is a favourite topic for trollumnists (troll + columnist) in the Sydney papers who write about the evils of bus lanes, bicyclists, pedestrians, hoons, p-platers, poor infrastructure and daily infra-urban migrations of workers and others. The latest is a column by north-shore darling Miranda Devine who writes with the devastating force of a strong opinion that is completely unsubstantiated in any shape or form.

Devine writes for a certain kind of conservative readership that isn’t too well educated, but unfortunately has to work alongside far more educated colleagues and subordinates. She taps into the existential frustrations of the ‘yes’ classes; those people at work who are quite happy to explain exactly what their boss wants you to do. She is good at isolating those minor frustrations that people have to put up with everyday in a city like Sydney and then associate it with a particular ‘type’ of person or people.

Whoever made up the Roads and Traffic Authority’s 1990s slogan ”the road is there to share” has a lot to answer for. It’s a big fat lie. The road is not there to share. Roads are built for cars. Pretending otherwise is unfair to motorists and cyclists alike.

Really? Then why does she go on to talk about the example of a bus and a cyclist? Beyond minor stupidities is the notion that the road is not a shared resource and that some road users are privileged users of the road over other road users. This is typical of conservatives, who don’t mind making appeals to brute physical force as trumping an ethics of (road) sharing when it works to their advantage.

As left economist Ross Gittins has also noted, road traffic is best thought of as a series of queues. Here is an in-depth blog post on the matter. The general idea is that queues are an immanent technology for the distribution of a limited resource. They form when they need to, and then dissipate when no longer required.

Road traffic is similar in that it is a complex series of queues. Devine seems to be throwing an it’s-my-party-and-I’ll-cry-if-I-want-to tanty about the fact that some road users, such as cyclists and pedestrians, force car drivers (and I assume bus drivers) to queue in a different way compared to the queues they would be forming purely with other vehicles.

I know how much Australians hate queue jumpers, maybe Miranda should mobilise the burden of her well crafted opinions and write something about ‘queue jumpers’ in traffic who cause far worse problems. I am talking about drivers who refuse to merge, who won’t anticipate the fact they will need to merge in upcoming traffic, those who duck across lanes into spaces that have been left by safe and considerate drivers during peak times and those that refuse to leave a safe travelling distance between cars insisting on travelling on the back bumper fo the car in front.

Here is a real world example. Have you noticed on the M4 or any heavily congested arterial road of Sydney that waves of movement start to form at a certain density of cars on the road? This has puzzled traffic engineers and physicists for a long time. Drawing on the anthropological part of my PhD, I shall provide my expert opinion of why they form. It is because there are two types of driver behaviour interacting with each other.

1) The lane hopper. There is normally very little reason to change lanes on the M4 as they all go the same way. Why are people changing lanes? Because they think one lane is going ‘faster’ than the one they are in.

2) The go-to-whoa-er. The go to whoa is an acceleration and braking-test competition held at many car festivals and shows around Australia. You accelrate as fast as possible and then brake heavily on a mark. Quickest wins. In heavy traffic the worst road users are those that helps propogate traffic waves by accelerating as fast as possible whenever their lane starts moving and then having to slam on the brakes (normally because of a lane hopper in the traffic in front of them). They accelrate hard to cut off the option of lane hoppers changing into ‘their’ lane. Why? Because they are queue jumpers.

A far more efficient way of driving during peak hour on motorways and freeways is to stay at a constant 40-50km/h. Try it the next time you are driving back towards the city on the M4.

One of my friends posted a link in twitter to this article in Truthout, a progessive US-based socio-political magazine, by Henry Giroux, on the

lethal combination of money, power and education that the right wing has had a stranglehold on since the early 1970′s and how it has used its influence to develop an institutional infrastructure and ideological apparatus to produce its own intellectuals, disseminate ideas, and eventually control most of the commanding heights and institutions in which knowledge is produced, circulated and legitimated.

Giroux engages with the so-called Powell Memo, written by Lewis F. Powell and released in 1971 to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” Powell recognised that right-wing and conservative ideologues had to create an infrastructure for the long war of the Reaganite and post-Reagan years. Princeton University Prof. has noted how this infrastructure has supported the recent work of ‘tea party patriots’ in challenging their congressional representatives at ‘town hall’ meetings over the US health care reform. Giroux says it is essential to attack this infrastructure, not just its effects.

Any attempt to understand and engage the current right-wing assault on all vestiges of the social contract, the social state and democracy itself will have to begin with challenging this massive infrastructure, which functions as one of the most powerful teaching machines we have seen in the United States, a teaching machine that produces a culture that is increasingly poisonous and detrimental not just to liberalism, but to the formative culture that makes an aspiring democracy possible. This presence of this ideological infrastructure extending from the media to other sites of popular education suggests the need for a new kind of debate, one that is not limited to isolated issues such as health care, but is more broad-based and fundamental, a debate about how power, inequality and money constrict the educational, economic and political conditions that make democracy possible.

What I found fascinating was one of the techniques advocated by Powell for reconfiguring the ideological composition of university faculties, because it is used in Australia and not only for attacking universities:

Powell recognized that one crucial strategy in changing the political composition of higher education was to convince university administrators and boards of trustees that the most fundamental problem facing universities was “the imbalance of many faculties.” Powell insisted that “the basic concepts of balance, fairness and truth are difficult to resist, if properly presented to boards of trustees, by writing and speaking, and by appeals to alumni associations and groups.”

In Australia, calls for ‘balance’ have been made by conservatives when attacking the perceived ‘imbalance’ of public broadcasters, such as the ABC and SBS, and the ‘public institution’ of journalism. The call for ‘balance’ has no easy counter, especially when combined with the amplificatory effect of the conservative echo chamber of soft-conservatism in daily newspapers and the hard-conservatism of politicians and conservative newspaper columnists. I guess the equivalent on the left side of politics to the conservative infrastructure would be the work of NGOs and unions, but they don’t seem to have the same effect on cultural and social levels to inflect the ‘talking points’, a.k.a. what John Howard called ‘BBQ stoppers’, except in limited examples such as in the case of the work of unions to highlight the lack of fairness in the Howard governments labour and workplace relations legislation before the previous Federal election. Or am I wrong about this? Maybe I don’t see the effect?

The ‘balance’ line of attack is arguably more successful than other attempts, for example, to argue that ‘left wing theories’, a.k.a. ‘postmodernism’, has little utility in the ‘real world’. Poststructuralist theories from philosophy, literary studies, sociology and cultural studies are much more effective than neo-classical social theories at understanding social relations and cultural meanings, hence, they are exceptionally useful if your purpose is to exploit social relations or cultural meanings as economic resources. The problem for conservatives is that once you start to understand these theories properly you can’t really be a conservative anymore. To understand the complexity of social relations means that you are forced to understand, intimately, the perspective of other people or at least strive to understand other perspectives. This is the inverse of the conservative line of ‘balance’. Instead of one’s own perspective and voice being incorporated into institutions, you are forced to incorporate other perspectives into your own. The number of conservative students I saw flee from learning such theories when I was a student was hilarious. They often tried to get into law.

We are hiring a whole bunch of new people at work, I have been working on a scholarly article about writing for car magazines, but I now realise I need to write a far simpler version so it is useful for people who may actually become motoring writers. The following is based on my experiences as a writer for car magazines (must be close to 100 feature car articles by now) over about eight years on and off and my PhD research where I have read several hundred magazines. The below is a very basic account of the process and different writing styles.

What you will need, but won’t always have at the start of the writing process:
1. Tech sheet. This contains all the various specifications of the vehicle, pretty much every single major part. The owner/builder fills this out.
2. Photos of car. So you know what it actually looks like and/or to be used as a reference resource when writing.
3. Interview with owner or builder of the car. This is to clarify certain elements of the technical details and to also get an account of the build. The easiest way to find out information about the build is to ask for a timeline. Often enthusiasts will describe what they did in terms of how hard somthing was to do and how much of a challenge it was. Without challenges there can not be enthusiasm.

There are three main ways to write the story, and each story could be written purely following these different ways with the right information. However, you normally have mixed information at your disposal so each story will be a combination of these three main types:
1. Use metaphor/simile. This is the last resort for me.
2. Locate vehicle in the scene. Good middle ground when you have little information about the build.
3. Narrative form of the challenges of the build. How I write feature car stories.

1. Stories based around metaphor/simile are normally written when not much about the build or technical details of the car are known. This can be because a new owner has taken possession of the vehicle and actually doesn’t know much or perhaps the owner can not be contacted in time to clarify technical details before the story deadline. Metaphor is when you say thing A is thing B, such as “The WRX is a bomb ready to go off.” Simile is when you say thing A is like thing B, such as “The WRX is like a fashion model transforming the George Street cruising strip into a catwalk.”

The imagery of a bomb or fashion model is used in a similar way to poetry. It works to create an image of the vehicle for the reader that is associated with various thoughts and feelings. In feature car stories the central image organises the rest of the text. Most car builders do not like these sorts of stories because they diminish the role of the car and certainly of the builder in the story which is more about the poetic capacity of the writer.

2. If you have a clear understanding of the particular segment of the scene to which the given vehicle belongs, and you have good technical details on the vehicle, but without much information about how the particular build occurred, then you can discuss the technical details in the context of their socio-technical function in the scene.

‘Socio-technical’ is a term derived from academic philosophy; it refers to the way all technology is not only technical but also social. One way to think about this is in terms of the function of technology to complete or satisfy tests, i.e. performance. These tests are culturally specific. For example, if you are concerned about the environment then you want to know how a vehicle performs as technology that produces pollution. Or if you are concerned about the speed and acceleration of the vehicle then you want to know how well the car performs in speed and acceleration tests. Certain humanities scholars and social scientists would describe this as the discursive dimension of technology.

‘Performance’ here has an ambiguity in modified-car culture when thought in a socio-technical manner. Modified cars also perform when they are turning heads, cruising the strip as well as when they are being raced on the drag strip. By locating the vehicle in the scene and drawing on knowledge of the scene you can explain the performance of various modifications. How well does the vehicle perform tests of acceleration because of ‘this’ and ‘that’ modification? How well does the vehicle turn heads cruising or at a car show with ‘this’ or ‘that’ modification?

3. My preferred way of writing feature car stories is by writing up an account of the build. My signature modus operandi is to focus on the challenges of the build that demanded of the enthusist that he (or she, but normally it is a ‘he’) mobilise his (or her) enthusiasm. Real enthusiasts know that building modified cars is about facing the challenges they present. A modified car is a topological inculcation of socio-technical challenges that an enthusiast has ‘risen to’ and overcome. The subject of the story then is less the poetic form of the story or the car itself.

All three types of story are often incorporated into each story.

Structure of main copy.
Opening paragraph: I normally open each story by using imagery to create a tone and creating a relation to the scene by describing or implying the location of the vehicle in the scene.
First section: Describes the aquisition of the vehicle and how the project started.
Second section: Provides an account of the main features of the build and the challenges that they posed.
Third section: The remainder of the technical details.
Repeat: Sometimes vehicles have undergone more than one build, so repeat sections 1-3.
End section: What is the character of the enthusiast’s satisfaction, what goals were accomplished, and what goals are remaining (if any beyond pure enjoyment of a completed project).

Besides the main copy you will also need to write up a few different bits and pieces:

1. ‘Tech breakout box’. This is a separate box from the columns of the main text and it contains every major technical component that has been modified or replaced.
2. Owner profile. This is basic biographical detail about the owner and perhaps a few direct answer to specific questions.
3. Captions for photos. As the writer you are the expert about everything you are writing about (or should be), you isolate particular important elements of the car and make sure the photographer takes proper photos.
4. Possibly another breakout box depending on the nature of the car. Often you’ll use a particular fact, component or technique to expand and add another dimension to the story. I often ring up the engine builder or someone else associated with the build and get an expert opinion on some facet of the car.

That is purely on the writing side of the job. Before you start writing, you need to find the cars. This is the journalistic function of the job, to investigate what is happening in the scene and know when cars will be finished and so on. After you have finished the story, and hopefully spoken with the owner/builder, you will also have to supply ad leads to the ad sales department based on the businesses that did work on the car and are mentioned in the tech sheet.

I couldn’t resist making a motivational after reading the epic lol that is this story. Erin Burnett, an anchor on American financial news channel CNBC, launched a verbal attack against Rudd:

“There is a serial killer in Australia and we are going to put a picture up so we can see who it is,” a stern-faced Burnett said during a segment on CNBC on Tuesday.
A large photo of Rudd was then shown.
“That would be the prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd,” Burnett said.
“OK well do you know what he is doing?
“He has launched air strikes – air strikes – against camels in the outback.”

I think Burnett has seen Aliens one too many times.

Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Hudson: Fuckin’ A…
Burke: Ho-ho-hold on, hold on one second. This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it.
Ripley: They can *bill* me.

…but why won’t anyone think of teh camels?