Autoblog, As We Know It, Is Dead

I’m getting sick of writing obits for media properties I once enjoyed and, in fact, I’ve glossed over a few of them because it’s too sad. The near-term departure of Autoblog, however? I can’t in good conscience ignore the passing of a website that was so important to so many people, including myself.

What I currently know, based on a post on LinkedIn, is that the site has been sold and everyone has been told they’re going to be fired. This wasn’t due to anyone doing anything wrong, rather, it’s because the parent company said they were going to fire everyone as part of a sale to a different company.

Even if a few people manage to stick around a little longer, the departure of all the full-time staff of Autoblog is a terrible moment in modern automotive history and worth recording since the site celebrated its 20th anniversary just a couple of months ago. There’s no reporting on this and I’m not sure how public the news is, but I’m quite sure I’m not telling any secrets here.

I actually found out about this from longtime Autoblog contributor/editor and current Autopian contributor Sam Abuelsamid who noted it on LinkedIn with this post:

It’s been just shy of 18 years since I started transitioning from working as an engineer to writing professionally about the auto industry first as a journalist, than a PR flack and now as an analyst. That transition began with Autoblog and the now defunct AutoblogGreen where I got to cover a lot of big stories including the debut and development of the original Chevrolet Volt. Over the course of four years, I wrote more than 7,000 posts that appeared on the site including news, interviews, vehicle reviews, opinion pieces and deep dive technical reviews.

Autoblog just recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and I found out some sad news the other day. Apollo Global which acquired Yahoo (including the former AOL properties ) from Verizon has sold off Autoblog and the current staff have been informed that September 13 will be the final day for Autoblog in its current form. Arena Group, the new owners haven’t announced what they plan to do with the brand, but given what we’re seeing across a lot of other once respected brands like CNet, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just start churning out a lot AI generated slop. That would be a real shame for a site that many of us put a hell of a lot of effort into building from nothing into a respected automotive media outlet. David Thomas John Neff Sebastian Blanco Alex Nunez Dan Roth Damon Lavrinc Pete Bigelow Michael Harley Jeremy Korzeniewski Chris Shunk Drew Phillips and many others contributed to building something really cool back in the day. I’m proud to have been a part of it

If you’re in the industry, or even just a more-than-casual reader, that list of names is incredible and goes to show the massive impact the site over the last two decades.

While there were many car news sources in existence when Autoblog launched, it took years for most of them to catch up to what Autoblog and Jalopnik were doing.  Autoblog was one of the first purely online sites to regularly review cars. It was one of the first sites to play ball with automakers and publish embargoed information.

For almost a decade, if you were reading about car news on the internet you were almost certainly getting it from Autoblog or Jalopnik. The site is still one of the biggest car news sites on the web.

What’s Happening Here?

To understand what happened you need to understand a little bit more about the site’s many, many parent companies.

The site was initially launched as part of the larger Weblogs, Inc. network by Jason Calacanis in 2003. This was the slightly more straight-laced counter to Gawker Media’s tabloid attitude. Some of the biggest sites when Weblogs launched were Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystiq.

Calacanis and his investors, probably wisely, got out early enough in the blog era when the company was sold to then AOL Time Warner. The Time Warner part only lasted until 2009 when AOL was spun off from Time Warner. For reasons that make no sense in retrospect, AOL bought The Huffington Post for more than $300 million, and a bunch of the old Weblog brands that still existed were either shuttered or pushed into more popular verticals.

This era of the company was quite rocky, and AOL was eventually purchased by Verizon, which also bought Yahoo!, to create one big media company. Verizon spent about $9 billion acquiring both companies and then, when they realized this still didn’t make sense, sold it for about $5 billion to investment firm Apollo Management Group (which owns pieces of everything from the company that makes the Godzilla movies to the company that owns Wagamama) three years ago.

Did you get the timeline of different parent companies?
Weblogs->AOL Time Warner->AOL->AOL Huffington Post->Yahoo/Verizon->Apollo

At this point, the only two original Weblog Inc. sites left were Engadget and Autoblog, though some still exist as AI zombie sites.

I need a cigarette after all that, though I’m not done.

Apollo Group is in the process of selling Yahoo!/AOL to Arena Group, which also owns a bunch of other media properties and is in a lawsuit with Sports Illustrated over a potentially scuttled takeover. What’s next? No idea. As part of the sale, Yahoo allegedly told all or most of its editorial employees they were losing their jobs but, in theory, it’s possible some could be rehired by the parent company.

I just want to stop and applaud the journalists at Autoblog for continuing to produce often great work under what I’m sure were sometimes less-than-ideal conditions. Now that this is out of the way, a little story of Autoblog from my perspective as a competitor/friend.

Autoblog Was There First

I should be honest. There was a brief time in my life when I’d have been a little happy about this news. I’m not proud of this, but I’m sure none of my good friends who worked at Autoblog would be surprised as I worked for Autoblog‘s longest and most aggressive competitor for a number of years.

The peak of my antagonism (or nadir of goodwill and common sense) probably came at the Detroit Auto Show in 2008 or 2009. I’d been working at Jalopnik as a writer for a couple of years, and I remember running back and forth from reveals to my laptop in order to get posts up so I could attain the make-or-break link from social aggregator website Digg.

I don’t even remember the specific car, but I was sure that I’d beaten Autoblog to the story by about 12 minutes. I’m equally sure this was due to both my ability to quickly write and my complete disregard for anything remotely resembling copyediting. For whatever reason, Autoblog got the Digg link. I was quite upset. In retrospect, it’s a little embarrassing, and I’m happy to report that in the years that were to follow we mostly calmed down or, often, just decided to be assholes to MotorTrend for reasons that also make little sense in retrospect.

It was the aughts! What can I tell you? It was a different time.

If my memory is correct, Autoblog was larger by both staff and traffic than Jalopnik for most of the time that I worked at the site. It was a big deal when we had more pageviews at the end of the month, largely because it didn’t happen every month.

Autoblog also got there first. Nick Denton may have helped popularize the blog itself with Gizmodo and Gawker back in 2002, but Autoblog debuted in June 2004, approximately six months before Jalopnik.

I highly suggest you listen to this podcast with the original Jalopnik editor Mike Spinelli and early and long-serving Autoblog editor John Neff. In Neff’s view, by being called Autoblog, the responsibility for the site was to be something like the New York Times of cars. Jalopnik, with its ridiculous portmanteau name, was something more like the New York Daily News or MAD Magazine.

Over the roughly 10 years I worked at Jalopnik I got to see an amazing group of talented writers and editors lead Autoblog, expand into video (with the great The List with the late Jessi Combs, Chris Paukert, Graham Suorsa, and Patrick Mcintyre, and Translogic with Bradley Hasemeyer and Lora Cain), and break a lot of news. I almost don’t even want to name them all because I’m sure I’ll forget some. Sam captured many of them above, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t shoutout Damon, Alex, David, Zack, and Drew, specifically because I was often jealous of the great work they did and, for whatever reason, they still talk to me. In fact, I’m looking forward to grabbing a drink with at least a couple of old AB pals back at Pebble this week.

What’s Next?

I wish I could tell you. Autoblog is still publishing and I hope they can continue to do so for at least a little longer. Jalopnik itself has gone through its share of tumultuous ownership changes recently and is actively for sale.

Even though they’re both technically competitors with this site, the web has changed a lot in the intervening years. It’s been clear for a long time that there’s plenty of room for all of us, and it’s a better car web for enthusiasts when there are a lot of great sites, not just a few. Fingers crossed that whatever happens next preserves both the staff and spirit of these sites.

All screenshots via the Wayback Machine.