It's Wednesday - deadline day. Today's the day that the yellow Australia Post Express Post satchel leaves Adelaide and wings its way to Melbourne. In it are five feature articles - typically 10,000 words and fifty-odd photos of concentrated effort. These articles will form the next edition of AutoSpeed (Performance News has a late email departure Sunday night). On Thursday and Friday the Melbourne team - comprising Brendan, Ed, Ian and Andrea - will scan the prints, transparencies and graphs, lay out the text and paginate it. Across the weekend I'll proof-read the layouts, with corrections emailed and then completed on Monday. At midnight, the issue will be launched. And in just three days' time, the next issue will be heading eastwards....
The Stories
Each weekly issue of AutoSpeed starts as marks on the whiteboard positioned on the wall in front of my desk. If I look up from my keyboard (he looks up from the keyboard...) I can see two whiteboards. The top one lists all the article ideas that I can think up (er, from Exhaust Gas Analysis to OEM Workshop Tools to Diff Mods) while the lower one lists the content of the next 10 issues. Much of the next ten issues are blank - remember that's more than sixty articles - or, at commercial rates, about $30,000 worth... The columns (Michael's Speed Zone, Sophisticated Side, etc) are on a monthly rotation (Forg > JE > MK > Dave Rubie) and each week we try to have a feature car, tech story and special feature. Add News and another feature and that's the six stories for the week.
As each story is finished I cross 'em off with red marker, so I can see at a glance how far ahead (behind) we are from deadline. This pretty simple organisational approach juggles sixty or seventy or eighty stories simultaneously, each of which comprises text and photos or other illustrative material. So, up to 160,000 words and several thousand photos are being organised at any one time.
'Course, it's making sure that stories are finished on time and coming up with the original ideas which are the really hard tasks! The ideas for new stories come from your suggestions - through the Feedback Forum or by direct email - and from brainstorming sessions that Michael and I have. All the staff of AutoSpeed work from their own locations - there is no AutoSpeed office - and so those discussions normally occur while in the car on the way to a photo shoot location, on the phone or by ICQ. It's dead easy to come up with article ideas that we'd love to do - but because of cost or practicality reasons we simply can't. Instead, the ideas need to be achievable, they need to be relevant to the readership - that's you! - and they need to be able to be completed within a tight timeframe.
Also, despite requests to the contrary, AutoSpeed readers - and all car magazine readers for that matter - actually prefer simple stories, rather than complex, involved and detailed stuff. So a story on tinting windows will be more popular than one that discusses the refractive index of glass, a story on a DIY boost control will be more popular than a tech piece on the thermodynamics of axial and centrifugal compressor design! It's a juggling act to pitch stories that aren't simplistic but also not overly complex.
Technical stories fall into three or four different categories. Firstly, there's the DIY tech piece, showing how to make something using simple hand tools. The background to its development, the making and fitting of it, and the testing of the results are all included. These articles are extremely popular, but they are the hardest to put together, simply because very few journalists have the ability to develop and perform their own car modifications.
Next, there's the workshop story. This is where we go along to a workshop and watch a particular modification being done. The fitting of an intercooler, for example. Step by step photography, detailed costings, before and after tests - each of these makes for a good story. The aspects to watch out for when doing this type of story are threefold: the workmanship needs to be good, the cost/benefit ratio needs to be sound, and the story needs to be truthful. All sound obvious - often they aren't! (You know something's going wrong when the workshop proprietor says "Don't photograph this step..." or "Of course, I'll need to read the story before you print it...")
Thirdly, there's the tech background story. This is where the hands-on relevance to modifying cars is limited, with the coverage being of a new development - eg electric power steering - or of an older development - eg passive rear wheel steering - with which readers are not familiar. It's very easy for this type of story to disappear off into abstract academia - one reason while this sort of story is best not written by an expert in the field!
Each of these types of stories needs good quality photos and tightly-written text. Incidentally, we sometimes get offers of stories from readers and, if you've read last week's story, you'll realise that we just love to accept cheap or free story contributions! But almost invariably they lack any sort of illustrative material - which unfortunately means that when they are published they look boring, boring, boring..... The Jaguar Engine Epic story mostly prepared by readerJohn Littler, was a notable exception to this - he gave us literally dozens of pix!
Next up are feature cars. Because AutoSpeed runs an eclectic mix of cars, finding suitable cars isn't all that much of a problem. But finding them in a location that we can photograph them is. Professional photographers charge up to A$800 to do a shoot on a car - money that AutoSpeed cannot afford to spend weekly. This means that most times a staff member performs the photo shoot, which in turn limits the access to cars that we can feature.
Talking about photo shoots, we're often asked what sort of camera gear we use - it must be digital, mustn't it? Well, no. When someone tells us that they can supply us with pics cos they have a digital camera, we normally wince. At this stage, digital cameras able to be afforded by mere mortals are poor in resolution and capability. If you can't change lenses (or have a standard zoom that encompasses the range from wide angle to long telephoto), don't have exposure compensation and don't have the ability to set the aperture, you're going to be very limited in what you can do.
We use Nikon and Pentax 35mm gear, shooting on slide or print film and then scanning these in. (And one often-overlooked aspect of photo shoots is washing the car!)
In addition to feature cars and tech stories, we also run special features. Special features are of a more general nature - they include buyers' guides, this type of story, how products are made, and so on. Then there're New Car Tests, Pre-Owned Performance, Book Reviews and Classic Performance.
The Story Sequence
A month or so prior to the issue's deadline (much laughter from Michael Knowling - ok, ok - a week or two before deadline, then) I'll scan the whiteboard and work out what content I'm aiming to get into the issue.
For example, in the issue that I am organising at the time that I am writing this story, I intend running as the Feature Car a turbo Volvo, as the Special Feature the second part on Mark Marchesan and his R33 Skyline, as the Technical Feature a background story on the new 42 volt car standard, and as another Special Feature a story on a sound system car that takes a DIY approach. Oh yes, and it's my week for a From the Editor column, and I'm also running Part 1 of a two part series on car detailing.
Yesterday I rang to confirm the Volvo shoot - no good, the engine's out of the car again. Michael Knowling checked with Mark Marchesan - no good, the new exhaust isn't quite finished yet. The sound system car was supposed to be photographed by Michael on Saturday, but transport problems (why is his Liberty RS always broken? - I gave it a gentle life when I owned it!) means that the shoot instead happened on Sunday. But anyway, it did happen.
Okay, so schedule in a new feature car - Michael has found a radical Mini and the shoot can happen this afternoon.
[Stop press - Mini postponed; substitute twin cam Cordia.]
The sound system car story and pics should be ready by deadline day - so I need to replace the Mark Marchesan story with another. Hmmmmm, the story on sunroofs isn't finished yet, and I won't have time to build, fit and test the oil/air separator. Freelance contributor Greg Brindley has about four stories coming, but their actual time of arrival is hazy. Perhaps move Part 1 of the First Birthday stories up a week - the first will then actually be a week or two early, but no-one will notice that, will they.....? My column is done, Car Detailing Part 1 and the story on the new voltage standard is done; time to re-shuffle the whiteboard - but everything's basically on track.
Layouts
The night that I send the overnight bag to Melbourne - with the hard copies and illustrative material - I also email the story text and any Web images that are being used. On Thursday or Friday, the Melbourne team completes the layouts, and I can then closely proof-read them. I look particularly for photos that are too dark or light (or are upside down - it's happened once or twice!), hyperlinks that aren't activated, and gremlins like the wrong subheading or precis (contents page summary) being used.
I then send a corrections email - here's one from a few weeks ago:
On http://www.autospeed.com/A_0306/P_3/article.html "The widely-spaced speedo and tacho sit in deeply recess binnacles, separated ..." should read "...recessed..."
Darken http://www.autospeed.com/image.html?A=0306&P=3&IMG=4 a little
Please move http://www.autospeed.com/image.html?A=0308&P=3&IMG=4 to where
http://www.autospeed.com/image.html?A=0308&P=4&IMG=7 currently is and put
http://www.autospeed.com/image.html?A=0308&P=4&IMG=7 on page
http://www.autospeed.com/members/A_0308/P_6/article.html
On http://www.autospeed.com/members/A_0307/P_2/article.html the same photo
is used twice. Check with MK by phone if confusion isn't alleviated by looking at the originals.
The Melbourne team makes these changes by Monday, and I check them late Monday afternoon. At midnight the issue is launched. And by that time, most of the articles from the next issue are either completed or well under way, barring postponements and other inevitable delays...
Next Week - the Web side of things.
AutoSpeed - The Story! Part 1
AutoSpeed - The Story! Part 3
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