We’re edging closer to the upper limit of what I think is the right number of stories on the website in a day. There’s probably some traffic to be had at 30 stories a day, and some other car publications do this, but I don’t think that’s for us. Ideally, I think we want to be at around 20 stories a day.
I know this seems like a lot! I don’t expect everyone here, even as members, to read 20 posts every day (although, please do). The goal is to have something new to read every time you come to the site, to give you a place to talk about the most important car news of the day, and to always have something that makes you feel good about coming to the site.
As we pursue this goal we sometimes write pieces that don’t make it to the front page for one reason or another. Often, we’re just waiting for another comment or a bit more information. Sometimes we decide we don’t want to write the post anymore. Sometimes we entirely forget we wrote the post at all.
As a true behind-the-scenes look, here are some of the drafts we have not published and why (or at least my best guess). I’m mostly going to keep out articles that we’re about to publish, as those don’t really count:
How To Launch Your Car Hard Without Crashing Like A Mustang Driver
This is a good article and Lewin did a good job with it. We think it’ll be better if we can get an Australian burnout expert or someone to comment on it. This will probably run next week.
This New Chinese EV SUV/Truck Mashup Has A Design Element Right Off A 70s Datsun
Oops, just totally forgot about this one. I’m still curious about it. Maybe Jason will write it up.
(no title) Why (no title)
Ok, the first one was me just looking for a scratchpad for an interview I forgot was happening. The guy just called me and I quickly opened up a window to write down the quotes. This isn’t ideal. I much prefer to do interview notes in Google Docs as the autosaving is better, but it worked in this case.
The post from David is literally just “Why”
It’s a fair question!
The next post seems to be notes on the Tacoma that David hastily jotted down in the CMS:
Every Month Is Trucktober When You Live In America: COTD
We definitely forgot to publish a COTD, congrats… Cheap Bastard
You should have won a COTD award two weeks ago.
T
Another empty post that was started, abandoned, and autosaved. What was it supposed to be about? Who knows!
Avis Allegedly Has New Orleans Man Falsely Arrested After Long-Term Rental Confusion
This is an important one and I want to take a few more moments to talk about it.
Lewin is in Australia and, therefore, either finds his own stories or we’ll toss something to him late at night. This was a story he generated, based on the great work he did at The /DRIVE about Avis wrongfully having people who rented cars arrested. Specifically, someone saw the old story and reached out to Lewin, claiming something similar happened to her son.
Lewin tracked the story down as best as he could while most of us slept. There were some red flags and Lewin expressed those to me when I woke up (we tend to chat before he goes to bed, around 5 or 530 am here in New York). I spent this morning calling prisons in Louisiana trying to find more relevant details and even emailed back-and-forth with the woman who contacted Lewin.
Something about the timeline the woman was giving us, the details, et cetera that didn’t make sense. We decided to ask for more info and wait until we could hear the perspective from Avis. Eventually, Lewin chatted with a couple of Avis reps and, based on the additional reporting, we just decided there wasn’t a story here. It’s possible that the rental agency was too quick to call the cops, but based on the information we had it seemed plausible that the person renting the car made some bad decisions that resulted in her son getting arrested.
It sucks putting work into a story that doesn’t run, but I think we made the right decision in this case as we couldn’t be sure of the truth.
Toyota MR2 take
What’s the take Lewin? That they’re awesome? I wanna read this take. WTF?
These are pretty recent. Let’s go back and find an old one…
Hahaha… what?
[Editor’s Note: I’ll be sure to reach out to Murilee and ask him about how this Buick makes his meatus feel, and we’ll get to the bottom of this and either run the post or suggest a good urologist. – JT]
While I’m sure more articles = more driveby clicks, as a regular reader I’m already past the point where I can read everything you publish, particularly because I tend to spend as much time in the comments on an article as I do on the article itself. I definitely do not want or need more content, and I’m already having to skip or skim articles that might otherwise be interesting to me.
Quantity has been increasing, but quality hasn’t kept up. Yes, we still have a reasonable number of high-quality articles, but they’re getting buried in increasing numbers of low-quality fluff. Burying the good articles makes them harder to find, and makes me much less likely to read them. Or even to want to read them.
To quote Rust Buckets: “Basically, I really like where the website was about a year ago.”
Having read through the comments here I find that the majority of commenters agree that the current whatever number of articles are quite enough already.
I also fear that the site has started taking a few easy routes regarding the content lately. I have certainly noticed a bit more sensationalism regarding what articles get published and not. I would like to read more follow-ups from David’s vehicles for one and god knows what has happened to SWG. I still love the site,but I hope it is not forgotten what made it great to start with.
20 articles a day is a LOT, especially when the front page can only display 20 articles at a time and the search function isn’t that good. Looking for an article more than a coupe days old could become very very difficult. Y’all need to fix that.
But I like Autopian content, a lot, and I would like to read every single article without having to pick and choose. Not gonna happen with 20 a day. I also am not 100% pumped about the direction that some of the content has been going, I live for technical stuff and car culture stuff and Torch shenanigans. I want more Tracy deep dives and Bishop drawings and whatnot. Basically, I really like where the website was about a year ago.
I for one would limit the new articles to about 20 a day,I am struggling to keep up as it is. I remember in the beginning I would actually have time to anticipate the next article or two because you weren’t churning them out at the same pace as you are now. I realise that’s maybe not sustainable because traffic and clicks and shit, but I enjoyed reading every single piece and the quality would always be spot on.
8 ads in the body a single post makes this really hard to read. I get you’re trying to make money, but seriously I paid for the membership and still a deluge of ads.
Dang, you’re right, that is rather excessive.
Does this mean the SWG piece on Jaguar is greenlit? It is that still in an unfinished purgatory?
Or… was it published and I missed it?
YES
PLEASE
YES
GIVE ME THE JAAAAAAG CONTENT I CRAVE
It’s languished long enough
Print the Jag article
I’ve been appreciating the lack of content on the weekends.
As a former journalist, I don’t miss the “you will be available 24/7 and dedicate your entire life to this” grind. I assume the lack of content means people are able to go do things other than work for two days. That’s good, and more outlets should be moving in that direction.
“We definitely forgot to publish a COTD, congrats… Cheap Bastard”
Better late than never!
An exclusive thanks in an exclusive post, that’s extra special.. right?
Suitable for framing.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that the site is growing and thriving, but I have to agree with several other commenters that the number/length of articles being published might already be touching that upper limit.
My backlog of unread articles is getting out of hand, and lately it seems that keeping up with the articles feels like more of a task or chore than it is entertainment (which I know is completely absurd because no one is forcing me to spend my time here, but it’s driven by a sort of anxiety/FOMO). Alas, I only have so much time I can commit to reading each day, so I just end up quickly skimming articles and not really interacting in the comment section, which is a shame because the comment section is one of the things that really makes this place stand out from other car websites. Similarly, I’ve popped into the Discord on occasion, but with how much time I already spend reading the site, I can’t really justify spending more time over there, even if I’d really like to.
I guess the takeaway is that reducing the volume of content may, somewhat counterintuitively, strengthen the community.
Wait, you take NOTES in the CMS? I’ve gotten The Lecture for working in the CMS before, but YOU TAKE NOTES THERE????
That is a new flavor of sicko I never knew existed. Sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done. Here’s a notepad and a pen. Draw some dingdongs with it like a normal frickin’ person.
Since I’m not a member, at least not yet, I have yet to see those drafts or topics but I do wonder if any of them would be about Zeppo’s clamps.
The part where [REDACTED] said [REDACTED] was pure gold.
Uh, thanks? Okaaay…
Ah…. My first members-only post. Feels good. Feels really good.
{ slides over the bottle of Welcome Malört }
PROOOOOSTTTTT
Oh god, Malört. It’s the mathematically optimized maximum of good times and bad decisions.
I mean, Jalopnik had brefass scotch. I think it’s time for all us ex-Jalops to finally break out the LUNCH MALÖRT.
Notice nothing sitting in CMS purgatory is mine because everything I pitch is gold.
TBH 20 is too much. Sometimes I feel like the conveyor of new content at Autopian is like this: https://youtu.be/K3axU2b0dDk?si=ZiuMPeHeWUTPoFol&t=27 The pity of it is that there’s good content that’s now buried on page 99 of the feed that I’ll never see because there’s not much curation beyond the feed. I don’t know if people would use it, but if there were other categories you could click beyond “reviews” “deep dives” and “feed”, then maybe. I appreciate the “related” list at the bottom, but maybe a related list sidebar (instead of recent) would surface some of that stuff. I know wordpress allows you to create pages of content based on the categories quite easily. It’s just that your categories are something of a mystery…but might be interesting on their own.
It depends on how long the pieces are. Some, he said as tactfully as possible, seem to be longer than one might think necessary. For example, I don’t know that we needed nearly one thousand words to explain why repair shops have big safety hooks.
Sometimes I’ll start reading an article, then realize that I’ve been reading a while and there is still an awful lot to go. If it’s a topic in which I might take a casual interest/about which I might be curious, but am not an enthusiast, I generally won’t push through to the end.
To be clear, this is in no way a knock on the authors or on any of the staff. It’s more about the amount of time I can allocate to the site each day and its relation to how the content is presented.
I’ve seen an article of mine balloon beyond its intended size because David wants to be thorough to a point.
I do understand the engineer’s need to explain everything but then you end up with a mammoth of an explainer even I had a hard time reading through.
Striking that right balance between Educational and Entertaining is a bitch.
It’s the 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag problem.
An old newswriting mentor of mine used to like to describe it as killing puppies. Everything you write is like your puppy. You love it and want to nurture it. But sometimes you have to kill those puppies to make the story better.
Yeah I’ve heard about this but in that case the editor asked me to bring the puppies back to life.
I did push back a little but I’m not a professional writer, so in the end I trusted David on this.
I wasn’t criticizing you. Writing tight is hard.In television it was so necessary that it became second nature. If they give you 45 seconds to tell your story, you’d better not be more than 5 seconds over or the producer will be pissed, and so will the coworker who just had to shorten her story because of you.
But it swings both ways. You can only get so tight before you start blurring details and then you have to figure out which details are crucial and which aren’t, which is one reason TV news tends to be so flufftacular.
There was a reporter in Baltimore who did a story once that amusingly highlighted that balance-seeking. The story was about a local factory that made titanium dioxide. That’s used to make things white, which is weird because in raw form, titanium dioxide is black. He needed to talk about that because all the footage showed this black powder, so he came up with “it enters the factory and in a process too complicated to explain here, becomes white!”
Yes, it can be very challenging.
For the past dozen+ years I’ve been writing about technology law for a magazine; that content really skews Educational (Ed) so making the feature articles remotely Entertaining (En) can be entertaining in itself. For the items that are not at all En I try to make them relatable/applicable to real-world situations.
The editorials, however, are less formal and closer to the garden of Ed-En.
I think I’d rather have a higher quantity of articles vs. a big ol’ long one. Break up the information into easily consumable bits I can read across several different bathroom breaks in a day. Easier to keep my place, easier to comment on specific subjects.
(Said as a frequent offender when it comes to long ones. Breakouts are fine! Sometimes you’ve gotta spin out the interesting details into their own jam.)
I fully agree! Out of the four articles I wrote, I like the shortest one better.
But on the other hand, I’m paid per article so I can understand how this approach may be unappealing to the editor.
Oh yeah, that’s a tricky pitch as a freelancer, for sure. 🙁
Yeah, like I have this draft about brakes thermal behavior. It’s a 3000 words long one so I wanted to make two articles out of it, plus a third one later once I install that BBK on my car.
Publishing everything all at once would give the Autopian many words for the price but I doubt anyone would read the thing entirely, so I’m not sure about the overall value proposition.
Anyway, I’m swamped at work right now so it’s a problem for future Manuel to figure out!
There have been some hugely long articles that are pretty compelling, but yes, a lot of them seem 20% too long. And I love you David, but I don’t want to read about converting degrees to radians or whatever.
I wonder if collapsible content is viable somehow – like spoiler tags on some sites, or notes on TvTropes. You know how you can group cells on Excel and collapse columns that are important, but maybe not relevant for the first viewing? This, but with paragraphs.
I notice that sometimes the article goes into tangents that, depending on how much I care about the subject, I’ll either rest every last sentence and open the links in new tabs, or skip directly.
A collapsed section with just the tl;dr version would help me keep focus on the casual reading, and explore and peruse the taillight content I come here for (and I’m not even joking anymore, this thing get you hooked).
20 a day is a lot.
One thing I *used to* love about this site is that it’d get me reading things I didn’t know I wanted to read, learning about things I didn’t know would be interesting (or that they even existed).
I read them because they were what was available to be read and I was hungry for content … I didn’t necessarily know what I was eating, but I tried it and I liked it, sometimes even loved it.
Now, many days, I skip past a bunch of articles, skimming the headlines to find something I’m reasonably certain I’ll enjoy and, no doubt, missing out on gems. This means I’m looking for regular features or writers I’m already familiar with or a topic I’m interested in. So … there’s a lot less discovery, less abilty/capacity to savor what’s here, and perceptibly less magic.
Same.
I was going to make the joke that “The goal is to have something new to read every time you come to the site” means that I learned that I refresh the site too often. It used to be true that I would reload often enough that there are not any additional stories up. That’s not true any more.
The reality is that I used to read every story and then into the comments, even on the stories I didn’t think I would be interested in. That’s not true anymore either.
In reading everything I found a lot of interesting, useful, and funny things that I’m probably missing at this point.
I think the biggest thing is that with a faster pace is that I’m interacting with the comments less, or at least a lot less seriously. Posting a flippant comment, sure I still do that. Actual serious engagement, lessened.
I agree and I wonder what they might think about taking some of those 20 posts/day and increasing the weekend content just a little bit.
Agree, I’m reading and responding to fewer posts. Many I just skim, like Lewin’s on the how a frunk affects crashes. What I read was well written and interesting, but I just can’t consume that much content every day. I read every post for the first 6 months of this site, then I had to stop.
Absolutely agree with both of you. I’m sure I’m missing things I would enjoy, but am too overwhelmed with content to go through it. And even some of the things I would have read before, like the long David Tracy article about driving Chinese cars in Germany, end up with a fairly cursory skim.
And I’m pretty sure my comment engagement has dropped considerably. At one point, I was posting the most comments (that stat led me to reduce my commenting somewhat, though not as much as I probably should have), and I’m pretty sure I’m now commenting significantly less on the higher volume of articles.
I definitely want this site to be successful, but I do miss the days when I was reading everything posted.
I thought everyone in Australia was a burnout expert. Isn’t that part of driver’s ed in that part of the world, or have I been lied to all these years?
I love that your website has more in common with my “wrenching” aka many things started some stopped for good reasons, others not so much.
It wasn’t about Lewin’s take on the MR2, but Toyota’s gross revenue and profit (the take) over the model’s three generations. Y’all (well, not all y’all, as despite his Australiality, Lewin seems to be sufficiently aware) need to get a little more familiar with the abundance of synonyms and near-synonyms that allow for very subtle changes in connotation and mood that is part of the rich heritage of the English language. Maybe Torch can host a weekly usage clinic on Zoom.
I know the limiting of new articles is calculated as you said in the beginning. I do wonder about follow-up articles that never come though, or articles that are a year later. Kinda screws with our (mine) mental timelines. Like what happened with David’s combining 2 jeeps into one overlander project?
Keep up the good work though
Please be sure to include a paragraph or two on ‘shed skids’.
And I find the idea of a Burnout Expert as a consultant both amusing and tempting as a career change.
Where do I apply for that position?
Well, most Buick drivers are from the era of syphilis and gonorrhea.