by Doug DeMuro
So I was standing in the CarMax parking lot next to a twenty-year-old Land Cruiser, Carfax report in one hand, phone call with Joe in the other hand, and some men in CarMax Polo shirts started approaching me. And that’s when I remembered: Oh my God, I’m here to get an appraisal on my Skyline and write a column about it! What the hell is wrong with me?!
So I decided to be a reasonable person and recommit myself to my important journalistic endeavor. I told Joe I would call him back in three minutes.
Unfortunately, the CarMax people had walked outside to deliver some bad news: they couldn’t appraise the car. I think they said it was too unusual for their system, or too weird for their appraisal tool, but either way it wasn’t going to happen. Now, at this point, I should’ve been utterly depressed: my column had just been ruined by the fact that I couldn’t get CarMax to put a value on my car. Hundreds of thousands of people would click my headline (“I Took My Nissan Skyline GT-R To CarMax For an Appraisal”), and all of them would click away unhappy. I should’ve slinked back to my car and returned home, all the while thinking about how I would possibly salvage this story.
Instead, I called back Joe to discuss buying the Land Cruiser.
And as we were talking through the potential benefits and drawbacks of the car, it happened: Thane walked out, keys in hand. He hadn’t sold the Land Cruiser to CarMax. He was keeping it for himself, which meant he was going to be selling it to me.
“Should I do this?!” I asked Joe, as the Land Cruiser owner walked up to it.
“Uh…” Joe replied.
“Should I do this?!” I repeated. The Land Cruiser owner opened the door.
I hung up on Joe. Too late. I was doing it.
“Hi, is this your Land Cruiser?” I asked. “What did they offer you?”
“Two grand,” he told me. “But a friend of mine already offered twenty-five hundred.”
“And how many miles?” I asked.
“Just under 200,000.”
Of course, I already knew that.
This price was a total steal. The only way that a mid-1990s Land Cruiser finds it way to Craiglist for $2,500 is if it was involved in a serious accident and the firefighters used the jaws of life to gain access to the passenger compartment, and then afterwards they used the thing as a training tool to show other firefighters how to use the jaws of life by cutting the car into two distinct pieces.
And so, I decided to throw ethics to the wind.
“I’m interested in it. Can I get your phone number?”
And there I was: standing in the CarMax parking lot, getting some random guy’s contact details so I could make him an offer on a Toyota Land Cruiser that he had attempted to sell to CarMax. As I drove home, I wasn’t disappointed that CarMax didn’t make me an offer on my Skyline, or ruminating about how I could possibly write a good column about a CarMax offer that didn’t happen. Instead, I was thinking about whether I should buy a twenty-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser from a stranger I met in a parking lot.
Now, those of you familiar with my work will know that I do not own an old Land Cruiser. Mostly, I blame my location. The City of Philadelphia, where I live, has the highest car sales tax rate in the country—8 percent—which means I would’ve had to give the guy $2,600 for the truck, plus pay another $200 in taxes and $150 or so in fees in order to register it. Additionally, I don’t have anywhere to store it: street parking is a nightmare in Philadelphia, my house only has one private parking space, and local garages charge upwards of $250 per month. Plus, the truck’s annual state safety and emissions inspections were coming due next month, which means I would’ve had to find someone willing to sign off on a twenty-year-old, 200,000-mile Land Cruiser. In fact, I suspect that’s the reason the guy was selling it in the first place.
So I didn’t buy the Land Cruiser. This will probably surprise you if you know my work: The guy who drover his Aston Martin on a frozen lake. The guy who crushed a PT Cruiser with a Hummer. The guy who got pulled over twice in one night in his Skyline. The guy who strapped a TV to the roof of his Ferrari. That guy skipped out on a bargain-priced used Land Cruiser?
And indeed, this is true. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
So You Want to Be an Automotive Journalist
I would say I basically get three types of e-mails.
One: I get e-mails from people who say they hate me, and they want me to die a fiery death, and do I have any children that they could cut into small pieces and feed to vicious land animals, such as the hippopotamus? These e-mails cause me tremendous discomfort, because the hippopotamus is really a water animal.
Two: I get e-mails from people who say they really like my writing, and they think I’m funny, and why the hell haven’t I released a new video this week? These people seem to really imply that they love me, and want me, and need me, and they’re desperate to suckle on the teat of my poorly produced YouTube channel.
And then I get e-mails from people asking how they can become an automotive journalist.
To the first and second groups, I always provide the same thoughtful, well-meaning reply: How dare you speak to me!
And now, today, I am going to address the third group with a few nice little instructions on how to become an automotive journalist. If you actually do become an automotive journalist using this information, I insist that you please send any money you make to me, Doug DeMuro. This is sort of like those people who will teach you how to get rich if you send them $479, and their business is always called Secret Wealth Unlocker, and their website has the word “entrepreneur” misspelled, and they’re located in Florida.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Do not read this if you do not want to become an automotive journalist. That would be like reading an instruction manual for an IKEA bookshelf (name: Kezelwoof) while you’re sitting on an airplane. You aren’t putting together an IKEA bookshelf, you idiot! You’re on an airplane! Please leave this information for real, live humans who want to become automotive journalists so they can live out their lifelong dream: writing about Honda Accord rear seat room.
And so, without further ado …
Automotive Journalist Step 1: You have to love writing. I would say about half of the people who ask me about becoming an automotive journalist will be eliminated from actually doing so because of this one thing. I say this because their e-mails use terms like “lol” and “anyways.”
Now, I admit that my own e-mails are far from perfectly edited: they often include too many hyphens, or too many exclamation points, or I will write “3” instead of “three,” or I will forget to capitalize the “H” in How dare you speak to me!
But here’s the deal: when you use the terms “lol” or “anyways,” you are not a writer. You are a human being who uses the terms “lol” or “anyways.” It’s like if you’re obsessed with food, and you spend your life collecting oregano from various corners of the earth, and you actually know what a chiffonade is, and you can tell the difference between North American wild boar and Mexican wild boar just by the way it falls on the plate, and then you hear about some friend of your wife who says he’s a “foodie,” and so you’re so eager to meet him, and talk to him about food—your life’s passion, your greatest indulgence—and then you finally get the chance to talk to him, and you ask him: “What food do you like best?” And he replies: “Macaroni Grill.”
“Anyways” is the written equivalent of the Macaroni Grill foodie. It’s a red flag that this person will never, ever become a writer of any sort, unless they are employed to craft warning signs at the airport. These people will have better luck working for Secret Wealth Unlocker.
Here’s the reality of being an automotive journalist:
Amount of time I spend driving cars: 4 percent
Amount of time I spend writing things: 96 percent
The result is that, in order to enter this business, you have to actually like writing a lot more than you actually like cars. If you become an automotive journalist, you do not wake up in the morning and
think: I’m so excited that I get to drive cool cars today! Instead, you wake up and think: I’m so excited that I get to write 1,500 words about the Nissan Rogue today! And, believe it or not, I do this. I wake up every morning and the very first thing I do, once I have sufficiently scratched myself, is I get right on the computer and eagerly start writing.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of people—both automotive journalists and those who want to become automotive journalists—who view writing as a necessary evil; a thing they have to do in between sweet press trips and seat time in exotic sports cars. These people will quickly become sorely disappointed with their career choice, sort of like the young kid who’s all excited to get an internship at NASA so he can work with rockets, and scientists, and the best technology in the world, and the most educated people in the world, and then they assign him to a six-month project assessing the best location for a new gender-neutral bathroom.
Of course, you do occasionally go on sweet press trips, and you do sometimes get to drive the latest exotic cars. But this stuff happen an insanely small amount of the time. When people ask you what your job consists of, when you’re an automotive journalist, your answer will almost never be “I spent Thursday morning driving the McLaren 650S around a racetrack.” Instead, you will probably say: “I spent Thursday morning describing the Lexus IS’s gauge cluster.”
So let’s say you’re good with step one. You do love writing. Then …
Automotive Journalist Step 2: Actually becoming an automotive journalist.
In my mind, there are two ways to do this: the normal way, and the way I did it.
I often have trouble counseling people on becoming an automotive journalist, and that’s primarily because I have absolutely no idea how most people do it. What I think happens is, you go to some college in Michigan, and you mow lawns for the cousin of a guy who shares a Netflix subscription with the editor of Motor Trend, and he helps you get an internship, and you spend the next four years fact-checking long-form articles about the 1965 Chevy Impala, written by some old journalist who’s constantly asking why the office phones are broken because he doesn’t remember you have to dial 9 first.
To me, automotive journalism seems like one of those businesses where you have to know somebody to get started, sort of like race car driving, or international jewel thievery, or selling goat milk to rest stop vending machines. This is probably because automotive publications get 40 million résumés a day from people in suburban Kansas City with stanced GTIs who read Motor Trend and think: I could do that. So they send an e-mail to the hiring department, and somewhere in that e-mail is the sentence: Anyways you should hire me lol.
So what if you don’t know someone? The trick here is to get really cozy with other automotive journalists, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that automotive journalists really love talking to other automotive journalists.
Seriously: go look on the Twitter account of some random automotive journalist and see who they’re talking to. What you will find is that virtually all of their communication is with other automotive journalists, and virtually none of it is with the people who actually consume their work. Here’s some proof: several years ago, I told an editor of an automotive publication that the readers wanted a certain thing, and he immediately snapped a reply that his publication does not do what the “readers” want, and while he’s the editor, it never will. I decided to not to fight back, although this did not seem to me like a good way to run a publication, unless the publication was Federal Prison Inmate Weekly.
Anyway: the point is that it’s really helpful to know someone in the car journalism business in order to enter the car journalism business. Unless, of course, you’re trying to enter the world of online automotive journalism. In that case, it might seem a little easier to get started, and that’s because it is. Every few weeks, someone will e-mail me or come up to me at cars and coffee and let me know my latest column or video was given a nice write-up on a site called something like CarZilla. And I will smile, and I’ll tell them that I think that’s awesome, and I’ll say that I can’t wait to go home and check it out, and the whole time I’ll be thinking: What the hell is CarZilla? Then I’ll go and look for it, and it turns out it has fifty million Facebook fans and a staff of twenty-four writers.
The problem with finding a job in the world of online automotive journalism is obvious: most of it doesn’t pay very well. You think CarZilla is throwing people four grand to write a feature article about the development of the Ford Mustang over the last five decades, with well-sourced quotes and high-quality images from some experienced photojournalist who covered the Osama bin Laden assassination? Hell no. CarZilla got thirty-seven million of its fifty million Facebook fans with an article entitled These 8 Cars Look Like Naked Women. The article included twelve pictures of naked women, and it used the word “anyways” six times.
So here’s the reality: it’s very hard to get a job in “traditional” automotive media unless you know someone. And while it’s very easy to get a job in “CarZilla”-style online automotive media, it won’t be very financially rewarding.
At this point, I know what you’re thinking: Well, you did it. How did you do it?
Well, there’s a secret. The secret is: I got lucky.
Yes, there was skill involved, and hard work, but there are hundreds of highly skilled, hardworking people interested in entering this field. The simple truth is that I got lucky, several times over: Initially, when my very first editor picked up a copy of the July 2009 issue of Automobile Magazine, which did a feature article about my “car spotting” hobby. Then later, when The Truth About Cars decided to publish a humor article I wrote about the Detroit Auto Show, even though nobody outside Top Gear was trying to mix “humor” and “cars.” A third time, when Jalopnik had a short period where they were hiring people on temporary contracts for a trial period, and I happened to be one of the people they hired. And a fourth time, when I had finally strung together enough writing gigs to afford a series of ridiculous cars that I could use to do very stupid, very popular things.
And so, I have a hard time counseling people on how they should enter this field, because my path primarily involved luck, timing, chance, and a giant yellow Hummer. But since I suspect that isn’t quite the answer you’re looking for, here are three things that have worked for me, beyond simply getting lucky:
1. I took jobs that paid only in exposure. People in journalism traditionally criticize writers who do this and publications who try to make them, but it worked for me. My thinking was that if I got enough Twitter followers and YouTube subscribers and name recognition, publications would have no choice but to eventually hire me—and I was right. I do not, under any circumstances, suggest taking a non-paying gig at Bill’s Car Blog, whose logo was created entirely with the pencil tool in Microsoft Paint. But if the New York Times knocks on your door and asks you to write a front-page story, you don’t waste time haggling over the fee.
2. I bought my own weird cars and did crazy things with them. So many journalists absolutely obsess over receiving press cars, because so many journalists absolutely obsess over showing off for their friends, or living a lifestyle where they get free things and make other people jealous. But I don’t think that’s the path to success.
Here’s what I learned: most people aren’t really interested in hearing yet another blogger’s take on the 2016 Lexus GS’s trunk space. You can get that information from Edmunds, or Consumer Reports, or whatever publication dentists read when they’re trying to buy a family crossover.
What people are really interested in hearing are the stories you’ll never get from those dull, risk-averse sites. What’s it like to strap a television to the roof of a Ferrari? What’s it like to bring a Hummer to a racetrack? What’s it like to import a Nissan Skyline GT-R? What’s it like drive on a frozen lake in an Aston Martin? Naturally, there’s some uncertainty involved with doing this, so you probably don’t want to do something stupid like buy a
n out-of-warranty Bugatti and make a YouTube video where you launch it into an active volcano. (AUTHOR’S NOTE: But if you actually did that, I would watch the shit out of it.)
3. I focused on the readers. Since day one, my top priority has been trying to provide the readers (and viewers) with the content they actually wanted to see, rather than the content I wanted to give them.
For example: I can’t even begin to describe to you how much I didn’t want to own a Hummer. But I let the readers choose my car, and they wanted to see a Hummer, and so I got a Hummer. And also an enormous amount of dirty looks from other road users.
Another example: I didn’t want to start making videos—until a reader named Alex suggested I give it a try, way back in the summer of 2013. My first video took three days to film, eight hours to edit, and at one point I got so angry I threw a stepladder at my Nissan Cube. Less than two years later, I can knock off a video in four hours, and my videos now get more views than my columns.
I meet readers on trips, at car shows, at racetracks, and at cars and coffee. A few weeks ago, I met a reader when he was washing his Mercedes 500E in his driveway in Washington, D.C. Despite what that editor told me years ago, readers are the key to popularity—and if you want to be successful, you have to focus on making content they want to see.