Motoring journalism has changed significantly in the past 30 years. I’ve had a ringside seat for three decades, charting the transition from paper to pixels as macro forces reshaped the publishing rulebook: changing media consumption habits, digital disruption and even the arrival of Chinese car brands all driving fundamental change. As I prepare for a new career outside of journalism, it’s a poignant time to look back at the changes I’ve witnessed.
This isn’t intended as a misty-eyed lament over the state of automotive publishing. Quite the opposite: the audience for expert-created content is larger than at any point in history, boundless digital frontiers bringing record audiences and opportunity. Outlets are innovating like never before, branching into video, events, audio, written and graphical content strands, as well as adopting new AI services such as CarGurus’ Discover tool to help car buyers. There have never been so many ways of sating your interest in and knowledge about cars.
But this plurality of media has wrought untold change to business models and to the working practices of motoring journalists. The once-sacred walled garden of the monthly or weekly car magazine of the twentieth century has been flattened by disruptive digital forces in the twenty-first. Their monopoly of expert knowledge has been shattered and the power of distribution snatched from the few who traded in expert content to a plurality of digital intermediaries.
How motoring journalism has changed over the last 30 years
- Life before the digital shift
- Print schedules dictated the news agenda
- The first seeds of digital disruption
- Proper grown-up digital strategies
- Liquid content: the art of now
- The changing face of motoring journalism
Life before the digital shift
It was all so straightforward when I landed my first job as a professional journalist in 1997. Working as a reporter on a local newspaper, we had no email and instead pounded the local streets and phones, suited and booted, cultivating relationships with the emergency services, community leaders and sources to find exclusives.
I made my interest in cars known early on and was soon making regular contributions to the car pages, before landing a job as motoring editor on a rival daily on the south coast the following year. The 24-page weekly supplement featured road tests, features, news and interviews with motoring locals (remarkably fruitful when your patch includes the Goodwood estate).
Weekly was the rhythm of motoring coverage back then; only the biggest motoring news would make the daily news agenda and automotive matters were consigned to the weekly specialist mags and supplements, or Top Gear TV in its snoozy Sunday night slot.
It’s hard to believe, but at the turn of the millennium nobody was creating car content more frequently at scale. This would explain why one of my first car launches – for the 1998 Mercedes-Benz ML – took the best part of a week in the US, driving around Alabama near the factory where it was built (above), and included a visit to the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville plus an afternoon messing about on jetskis. Truly, PR was a different game back then and work diaries less crammed.
Print schedules dictated the news agenda
It wasn’t all corporate largesse and global travel: the pace of creating a weekly supplement seemed all-encompassing at the time. This was the perfect training ground for a young cub reporter, and I learned how to serve an audience with content that resonated with motorists and local communities. It led to opportunities in London and I worked for controlled-circulation company car magazines aimed at fleet managers for a year, before being taken on by Autocar magazine as news reporter in the summer of 2000.
Even in the early Noughties, the entire editorial team was focused on the weekly print magazine, with a scrupulous focus on quality of thought and writing. Trusted opinions, impeccable car knowledge and sound judgment underpinned everything. Our staff numbered some of the biggest names in motoring journalism (including a rudely talented young road tester called Chris Harris… whatever happened to him?) and the working week culminated in late-night Thursday deadlines powered by Pizza Express, as we strived to out-scoop our weekly and monthly rivals on the newsstand the following Wednesday.
If you’ve ever wondered why so many large stories break on a Wednesday, even today, it’s all down to traditional print publishing schedules. All the big mags in the UK still hit the newsstand on a Wednesday, a deadline that used to be common across Europe. One well known British weekly tried going a day earlier to get the jump on its local rival, but the established centre of gravity soon pulled it back to mid-week, owing to those tasty pictures and drives of new metal being embargoed until Wednesdays.
The first seeds of digital disruption
It was in the early Noughties when I first remember skunkworks operations to build new-fangled websites for car magazines. What Car?’s launched in 1996 and Parkers followed in 1998, but they were typically staid domains mostly committed to selling subscriptions or storing data: far from the editorial powerhouses we see today.
But in the wake of the millennium, change was in the air. Channel 4 co-launched 4Car, an independent motoring website, in 2000 and Top Gear was reinvented by Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson in 2002 to make one of the most successful TV franchises of all time. Channel 5 launched Fifth Gear the same year and Max Power reached its zenith, becoming the highest-circulation motoring magazine of all, shifting nearly quarter of a million copies a month.
Emboldened publishing executives could see opportunity in the digital firmament and slowly resource was diverted to accelerate their nascent online products. What Car? was one of the earliest of the mainstream UK mags to invest at scale and I worked there twice in the Noughties, watching the audience figures – and revenues – grow at a ferocious pace as internet access swelled throughout the decade and dial-up slowly gave way to faster data services.
By 2006, everyone was piling in and I jumped ship to CAR magazine at Emap (which was soon bought by Bauer Media, its current owners), whose first editorial website launched that summer to accompany a radically reformatted magazine designed from the ground up to complement a faster-paced website.
Journalists were creating bespoke content designed for digital consumption, rather than merely repurposing printed stories, and by 2008 we were pioneering social media accounts for the brand, after a savvy marketeer mentioned he’d heard about this new-fangled invention called Twitter. Soon we were on Facebook, too, growing seven-figure audiences on social media seemingly with ease.
We had a brilliant but bijou team who pushed our fledgling digital infrastructure to the max, seeing what more nimble digital publishing practices could achieve. We innovated with live blogs from car launches, phoning in our first impressions for the hottest and most eagerly awaited cars, and pioneered an early podcast recorded in a local inn, which inevitably became the Pubcast.
YouTube followed, and without realising it, we had created a multi-channel digital business. There was no rulebook and we were let loose creating content for each new platform and working out the business rationale on the fly. There was wild experimentation and occasionally wild success, but more often than not, a chilling realisation that a particular new channel promised more than it delivered. Each took up more and more time, and resourcing rarely kept up.
Proper grown-up digital strategies
The late Noughties was an exciting time in publishing, but one underpinned by a sense of urgency. More serious investment began to flow to emerging technologies and platforms, and disruptive entrepreneurs came along to shake up what they saw as staid traditional publishing models.
Big names would occasionally quit established titles and strike out on new ventures; one of the most notable was 2008’s launch of Drivers Republic (below), headed up by a bunch of respected journos from Evo. With no print magazine millstone, they pledged to deliver the best digital content as quickly as its audience could consume it and they led with video. It was a brilliant premise, but sadly didn't survive. It felt like DR was ahead of its time.
Around this time, it became apparent that successful titles could make more money digitally than in print, as new channels and routes to market matured. The arrival of the iPad in 2010 brought app editions, pioneered in the UK motoring world by Evo and CAR; the use of mobile phone browsers introduced WAP sites and, later, fully responsive front ends that resized content dynamically to fill every which screen size; and services like Readly, Apple News+ and Amazon apps allowed all-you-can-read buffets, that debundled content from the brand’s own platforms. Each came with commercial opportunity and risk, but the bean counters saw potential for growth to replace sliding print revenues.
If all this sounds exciting, it was. But it was also complicated, convoluted and difficult for niche publishers with finite resources. The lives of motoring journalists became more frantic, as writers were expected to try their hand at presenting videos and podcasts, too. Dinner on car launches had to be skipped because they were burning the midnight oil to be first to publish a verdict, sometimes sacrificing quality for speed. Multimedia output is famously time-consuming and nobody created an eighth or ninth day of the week to make time for these additional content demands.
As publishing houses’ digital ambition grew, so they hired experts in search engine optimisation (SEO), data analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) to grow newsletter databases. Not only did the typical motoring journo have to be a multi-media guru in front of the camera, keyboard and microphone, they’d also have to learn the skills of a digital ninja, optimising for different platforms, building newsletters and even selling products through affiliate articles.
Traditionalists may have blanched at the demands made by digital specialists, but I’ve always believed there’s a way of telling automotive stories that will rank and find audiences that don’t have to sacrifice editorial quality. It’s the credo we believed during a stint at Microsoft’s MSN, which introduced me to the world of celebrities and cars: including a surreal day spent in a pink Rolls-Royce with Gary Barlow, Chris Evans, James May and Prof Brian Cox. Humancentric storytelling should always be more important than algorithms.
Liquid content: the art of now
Fast-forward to the 2020s, I’d boomeranged back to a major publishing house and found myself in the era of liquid content: stories are everywhere and users merely receive the version of the narrative that’s packaged to suit their need at any moment in time.
Consumption becomes passive, not active. Snacking on the go? The TikTok, Instagram reel or YouTube short may suit those in a rush. Want to read the full story? Google Discover or Apple News+ may snare casual readers, who are monetised by engaged minutes spent per article (cue many longer reads available on the latter) while the long-form YouTube video will be one of many media brands’ core outputs nowadays.
Discovery is the new battleground. Decisions on what you are served are increasingly made by algorithms, not personal choice. In a noisy and fragmented media landscape, being found is increasingly hard, even with a decades-old masthead at the top of your screen. Search is evolving yet again as Google and other gatekeepers want to keep users’ attention on their own products, not a third-party platform.
Competition is ever more fierce. Newer entrants, including CarGurus and CarWow, have brought disruptive new business models. Influencers and independent YouTubers move more nimbly than print-first publishers and benefit from a lower cost base to super-serve a clearly defined niche with an endless stream of quality content, and some are former publishing gurus, who’ve gone it alone (like Youtuber Harry Metcalfe). Standing out is increasingly difficult – impossible, even, if you have identikit content strategy with little originality or trusted authority – but those who really know their subject matter and can bring their expertise to life are faring well.
And yet despite the chaos and this dizzying velocity of change, the big six UK car magazines – by audited circulation: CAR, Top Gear, What Car?, Evo, Auto Express and Autocar – are all still alive and delivering high-quality content across an impressive proliferation of channels. Many smaller titles may have gone to the wall, but the biggest players are still publishing profitably, trading on trust, access and pedigree that newcomers struggle to match.
A smaller proportion of readers actually buy physical paper editions in 2026 – witness the shrinking newsstand in most newsagents or supermarkets – a trend deplored by a generation who grew up cherishing the production values of lovingly crafted magazines.
It’s harder to deliver pace, a deftly chosen running order, room for imagery to breathe and a finely curated mix of stories in a heavily templated and disaggregated digital environment. Don’t believe me? Go and buy one of the established mags above, or one of the glorious new indie titles like Road Rat or Magneto, and tell me they’re not a thing of beauty and knowledge. There's a strong argument that print still rules for a relaxed, lean-back read.
The changing face of motoring journalism
A typical magazine editor from a major publisher will nowadays be counting the number of focus channels on two hands, and others may be using their feet to keep tally. He or she will be prioritising channels with the most viable commercial prospects, whether funded by adverts, cover price or recurring subscriptions. There will doubtless be secondary platforms to amplify branding and reach, and these will come and go, as revenues wax and wane and the next faddish innovation arrives.
Most staff sizes haven’t grown to keep up with this plurality of channels; in fact, many are shrinking. At least content is now produced by a more diverse mix of genders, backgrounds and ethnicities than the narrower demographic of motoring journalists when I started three decades ago. And we haven’t even mentioned the onslaught of new car brands from China arriving in UK showrooms. Sixteen Chinese car brands, accounting for nearly a fifth of UK sales so far this year, have introduced even more vehicles to test, assess and shoot for content creation. And so it goes on…
So remember these crazy demands on journalists’ time the next time you browse a magazine, click on a YouTube video, scroll past a social media post or listen to a podcast. The quality of output from the sharp end of the UK media remains staggeringly high, to my mind. There’s innovation aplenty: witness Top Gear’s new Tech video channel, examples of publishers deploying AI to assist with content distribution, and newer start-ups such as The Intercooler’s fresh approach. If you know where to look and who to follow, there’s brilliant storytelling from trusted voices that’s as good as anything you’ll find in any back catalogue.
For the consumer, it’s never been easier to read about the car industry and stay informed. And for motoring journalists? Well, the next time you meet one, just ask when they last had a good night’s sleep.
