Re: 1938 Packard Eight Deluxe

Posted by su8overdrive On 2012/7/9 15:53:44

Special Interest Autos, when edited by founder Michael Lamm, then Dave Brownell, was the gold standard.
All the other downhome "classic and collector car" magazines are boys trying to do a man's job, bush league, embarrassing. Michael Lamm and Dave Brownell were and are literate adults who happen to love old automobiles.

Sadly, after Terry Ehrich, Hemmings Motor News publisher and a class act, died of cancer aged only 61, a North Carolina-based publishing conglomerate bought Hemmings, and the cringe-inducing "Hemmings Classic Car" replaced Special Interest Autos.
The new publisher also wasted no time deleting Terry's thoughtful urge for readers to recycle Hemmings and all forest products on each issue's opening page.

Perhaps much of the problem is simply that older, educated fellows who happen to share a love for vintage cars are being replaced by the products of dumbed down schools of the 1970s, so you wind up with magazines written by people who can't write, for readers who can't read.

It's the same at the mainstream roadtest monthlies. Compare the Road & Track of yore, with today's, in which the ONLY worthwhile things are by Dennis Simanaitis and Peter Egan. AutoWeek today has type twice the size it was in the '90s, with the usual happening dude graphics, being written by and for wizened mallbrats. Magazines and movies are edited and directed for
a lower horizon, ADD audience.

Automobile Magazine and Sports Car Market confuse pompous affluenza with literacy.

Esquire used to be a men's magazine. Now it's a "lifestyle" guide for avaricious boys. Even the New York Times Review of Books insists on head shots of authors.

This is more than a case of some of us accruing years.
It's declining literacy, narrowing education. These chickens are coming home to roost.

I'd be curious, for example, to see survey results comparing the percentage of Special Interest Autos readers who also read The New Yorker, vs. those who read "Hemmings Klassic Kar."