What's going on here then?
Righto...
Ahoy, I'm Mike.
A bit about me. I'm a motoring journalist, if a bit of a weird one.
I had a career in graphic design before stumbling into blogging about cars for the now defunct The Motor Report way back in 2007, in my mid 20s.
It was a strange move, given my obsessive love of identity and design, but I was also into cars, and it was a time when new blogs were springing up all over the still fairly 'wild west' web of the 2000s.
So, when the fledgling TMR saw my blog about classic Japanese cars and invited me to come along for the ride, it was an easy "hell yeah, let's go".
I had a decent-sized stake to help make up for the low pay (out of the founder's own pocket, I'll add) and to motivate us all through the long, startup-like hours. I was often up at 4am to compete with CarAdvice's US-based writer, Derek Fung, and I sure don't have that kind of energy anymore!
After a long road of hoping that one would eventually make me financially secure enough to just blog for fun and choose my own design projects, I was invited to join CarAdvice (my thanks to Mike Costello for recommending me) in 2015.
It was a welcome payrise, a management position, and finally the resources to do bigger things!
I had some incredible adventures with our CEO Andrew Beecher (who I consider a genius and an absolute chaos agent), the founders Alborz and Tony, early recruit Paul, and the biggest content team in the game. I even recruited and managed a few of them myself! I genuinely miss the whole damn team. Well, most of 'em. 😂
And, that's... okay. A few of them don't miss me any more than I miss them, but that's life, right? My management style and expectations made me unpopular with a lot of folks.
(A lot of those expectations came from above and nobody will ever really know how many arguments I had with leadership about the demands being made of our content team, but that's business. You take a management role, you become The Man. Everybody knows that!)
Like any other business, there were targets and personal goals, shareholders to satisfy, a sale to work towards... and in the end, a small few made some big bucks. That's just what you do when you start a business or you take a salary in exchange for making the whole damn thing work.
There's a lot more to this story, but there always is, right?
Everybody's career has its share of wins and disappointments, but damn were there some great times in there, and I learned a lot – especially from a few leaders that truly wanted the best for me.
So, you take the good with the bad and you roll on!
TURBO!
Righto, Turbo, let's fire this thing up.
Remember when blogs were just fun? I was a regular reader and commenter on the American website Autoblog back in the early and mid 2000s (check out this archive.org link from 2004!), before they sold to AOL – and I've never seen a bunch of bloggers have a better time just posting what they enjoyed.
Obviously they needed to be paid, but their way to get there was just providing entertaining and useful content to a dedicated audience. That's the sweet spot.
Of course, when you add more people, or worse, when you take on shareholders to fund big ideas, you commit to earning more and more money. In automotive, especially in Australia, that means getting as many car brands as possible to spend as much with you as your sales folks (that's yet more people on the team) can coax out of them.
I don't want to do that, and I don't think any of you have enjoyed all of the content that has resulted from it. I spent nearly 20 years writing the occasional fun story, but mostly turning out content designed to get clicks on social media and to satisfy Google's shitty search and News algorithms.
What's the plan, then?
Let's get back to blogging. If you want a break from complaining about the content on sites that have too little choice in what they publish, come hang out here for a while.
I'll mostly be posting news and just the stuff that I like. I want your feedback, of course, but if it ain't fun for me, there won't be much point. Right?
I'm not likely to get access to any (or many) press fleets or any executives to interrogate, so I can't promise you reviews, but I'll do my best to figure out a solution. At the very least, I'll be linking to reviews at the publishers I trust the most.
Expect cars, obviously – petrol and electric, get over it – but I'm also going to post cool motorbikes, design concepts, weird and whacky stuff I find, and even news about broader mobility news.
I hope you'll enjoy it, and I hope you'll be reasonable when you decide to tell me how much you don't like it!
Is it free?
Yes? No? I don't know.
Do you want ads and sponsored content and "urgh I bet they paid him to be nice about that car", or do you want fun and authentic content that you can trust because you paid for it?
I'd love to talk about it. Who wants to dive into a chat with me, or maybe even a video call, to argue about the merits of ad- and sponsor-supported content versus yet another subscription nobody can afford? Let's go. (I'm serious.)
I want to know your thoughts on how many dollars each month would feel right to help support a blog that you can hang out on, commenting and debating with good folks, just like the old days.