The Critics Respond, Part Four

On the night of Tuesday, June 18, I was unable to sleep so I cranked out a variety of content for different outlets. Two of the stories I wrote went up on TTAC the next day. As you can see, although the number of comments on the stories was very similar, the number of Facebook shares certainly wasn’t.

What’s up with that?

The article on the top, which had 97 comments and 436 Facebook shares (439 now — I took the screen shot twenty minutes ago), was about progressive journalist Michael Hastings and his high-speed crash. The article on the bottom, with 106 comments (107 now) and a staggering three Facebook shares, discussed an auction for the final Oldsmobile Alero.

To some degree, it’s depressing that these quick-bake stories, which took an hour between the two to write, edit, find the images, enter into TTAC’s WordPress system, and submit, both flat-out smoked a labor of love like the Avoidable Contact article on fake luxury or my intricate roman a clef The Car Girls. It would be easy to become cynical about my readers and create some sort of strawman TTAC commenter in my head who only wants to see shit blow up and argue about General Motors. Most of the writers I know in this business have done just that: they speak openly and contemptuously of the people who read them. Johnny Lieberman’s endless moaning about his YouTube commenters is a perfect example of how that attitude can paralyze you and turn you into an angry reactionary, blaming the people who pay your mortgage instead of the guy whose work they dislike; Jalopnik’s decision to focus almost entirely on “THIS is the BLAH that BLAHED with a VAGINA and a PENIS and a CAR CRASH and a LAMBORGHINI” is a perfect example of how you can spectacularly monetize that attitude but never create anything of which you might be remotely proud.

The good news is that I’m a total sociopathic narcissist and therefore I will continue to talk about Ford Aerostars and humblebrag about kicking ass in races and making out with teenagers and drag my son kicking and screaming into the overwrought narrative of my life. What’s the point of writing if I can’t do this stuff? Why bother to crank out SEO-bait and “THIS IS THE FERRARI THAT TOUCHED STEVE MCQUEEN’S TAINT” stuff all the time? It doesn’t pay in real-world terms anyway, even if it’s popular.

Back to our pair of stories. My initial thought was that the Hastings crash story would be heavily discussed but not shared very much. After all, it’s all over the regular news, from Buzzfeed to USA Today. If you want to alert your friends via Facebook that Michael Hastings is dead, my story’s not the most efficient or informative way to do it.

The Intrigue story, on the other hand, was virtually an exclusive. I found out about the auction through a Facebook discussion group devoted to Seventies land barges and I immediately wrote it up because it’s actual car news and it relates to General Motors and it’s important to a bunch of people who probably didn’t know about it beforehand. But while slightly more people chose to discuss it, almost nobody shared it, even though it’s the only story on the Internet right now on the topic.

It’s also worth noting that while general reader response to my take on the final Intrigue was positive, a lof of TTAC’s Best&Brightest thought I was being paranoid, inflammatory, Republican, or just plain ignorant about Michael Hastings. I was told that there are 150,000 vehicle fires a year. That’s sort of true, but if you look at the source documents, only three percent of vehicle fires are due to collisions, which upholds my original premise. Regardless of how right I actually was on that point, a lot of people thought I was just plain wrong about all of it.

Did all those Facebook shares read something like “CHECK OUT THIS MORON LOLLERCOASTARZ” or were they something like “Another intelligent discussion from noted intellectual and blues guitarist Jack Baruth”? I have no way of knowing. Are there any lessons I can learn from how the readers responded in their comments and in their behavior? Possibly, but so far all the lessons seem really bad variants on “Car fires are popular, automotive milestones are snooze-ville, long-form pieces on things about which you’re passionate are depleted-uranium shells falling silently to the ocean floor five miles below”. I don’t want to learn that particular lesson. I don’t want to write about crashes and car fires and drifting and “lad’s mag” garbage all the time.

I suppose I’ll continue to write what I want to write and let the consequences hang. If I need reassurance that I’m on the right path, I could just listen to the madman ranting in my head who tells me I’m never wrong. Or I could take solace in the fact that Hype and Hypertrophy out-commented, out-visited, and out-shared the Hastings crash thing.

Barely.