It hasn’t been a huge secret that MotorTrend, the popular magazine and website, was in the process of being offloaded. Who would buy such a publication? It turns out the answer is Hearst Magazines, the same company that owns Car And Driver, Road & Track, Autoweek, and BringATrailer. As MotorTrend also owns the zombie Automobile magazine and Hot Rod, this means that one company will own all of America’s traditional buff books.
The announcement was made today that MotorTrend Group, which more recently was part of Warner Bros. Discovery, will be sold off to Hearst Magazines and fall under the company’s Hearst Autos umbrella.
This is a big deal as, many years ago, MotorTrend was in competition with the likes of Road & Track, Car And Driver, and Automobile as well as Autoweek, all of whom had different owners at one time. Now they all have a single owner.
Here’s the announcement from Hearst:
MotorTrend Group will expand Hearst’s collection of brands for car enthusiasts and buyers providing even more up-to-the-minute content, commerce and community. MotorTrend Group’s vast portfolio embodies car culture from electric vehicles to timeless classic customs, reaching over 30 million users every month. Its robust events business draws approximately 500,000 passionate enthusiasts every year to iconic experiences such as HOT ROD Drag Week, Roadkill Nights and the Japanese Automotive Invitational at Pebble Beach.
“The acquisition of MotorTrend represents a strategic investment in our business — one that enables us to expand our digital offerings, reach an even broader and more diverse community of automobile enthusiasts and bring the most innovative opportunities to the market,” Chirichella said. “We look forward to welcoming MotorTrend Group to our Hearst family as we continue to drive long-term growth across the business.”
Wellen said of the acquisition: “Over the past 75 years, we have grown MotorTrend into one of the most influential automotive multi-media companies in the world, reaching hundreds of millions of car enthusiasts across all platforms. Joining Hearst, a business I’ve long admired, will ensure that our beloved collection of brands continue to serve and entertain automotive fans for years to come.”
This might also explain why WBD killed off Roadkill as a show, since it would no longer own the brand it’s connected to after this year.
The company says that the brands will still operate out of the company’s El Segundo, California and Detroit offices. There was, thankfully, no mention of any layoffs, though redundancies are usually found over time when big operations like these merge.
As a publisher, I can see the enormous sense this makes for Hearst, which has faced the same difficult advertising market that everyone else has over the last few years. Now when a car company sends out a request for advertising proposals there’s one less piece of competition for the team at Hearst (full disclosure: I did some work with the team at Hearst in my previous job) when it comes to the bidding.
In the short term, I don’t think this will impact the journalism done by any of these brands, though as a news consumer, I think it’s better when media isn’t so consolidated, which is why we will try to continue to exist as an independent organization.
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So all 3 will be crap and based on advertising dollars.
honestly, I happened upon a magazine stand at Target the other day. I had not seen one there previously, but I know that the number of publications at the local grocery store seems to dwindle annually. I was actually surprised Hot Rod still existed in print form. and doubly surprised Target of all places had it on the rack.
A family member gifted me a Hot Rod subscription a few years ago and it was pretty good. I like hot rods and custom cars so it’s not hard to delight me in that regard, but the magazine still has good content nowadays.
I am always surprised when I stumble on a magazine rack, so rare these days. I would think that Hot Rod and similar targeted magazines will hold on a little longer. I would think the readers average age is older and still consumes print media vs digital, at least at a higher rate than younger cultural trends in automotive or otherwise.
Target carries anything companies pay to have carried. For the last 12 years magazines, newspapers, and card companies pay for space.
Consolidation in media (and elsewhere) leads to faster enshittification. No motivation to deliver a better product when there’s no competition.
The competition isn’t other magazines, the competition is the very site you wrote this comment on.
The Autopian, Throne Edition confirmed?
If you are reading any of these in a location that is not your dentist’s waiting room just stop. The correct answer is Evo and The Intercooler. They are British and cover some stuff we don’t get here, but the writing is light years better and they feel far less like they are in the pocket of the car manufacturers than all the US based stuff.
If you have any interest in racing then Grassroots Motorsports is highly recommended.
I’d still argue Hot Rod is pretty good, if you’re into hot rods, which I am. Hard to be in the pocket of the big automakers when your subject matter is exclusively 90-60 year-old modified vehicles (outside of crate engines at least, but even those don’t fit the classic vibe most are going for).
Like my dentist has any magazines after 2010
As a lifelong lover of car magazines, I want to take this opportunity to tell all of you there is nobody on this site who shouldn’t be subscribed to two superb magazines:
Grassroots Motorsports
Classic Motorsports
They are sister publications. Both are fantastic and deserve our support (and I am a subscriber on this site, too!) Google them and you will find the subscription pages.
Googled them both, nice thanks for the tip!
Hemmings had a pretty good cross section of Hot rod/Classic/ and european at one time, I only see the classic one anymore, but it is often still worth a read.
My buddy used to be Editor of Hemmings Sports & Exotics before Hemmings management ran it into the ground. My all time favorite car magazine. Was a lot like this site, where it’s a community, and it did a good job of perpetuating the “we’re all car enthusiasts together” ethos.
Lack of money and lack of readers did it. Editorial departments always want complete autonomy but to be held blameless when readership declines. Great work if you can get it. But it is what destroyed newspapers.
Not my bag. Stay in your lane I’ll stay in mine
Ew. This feels like Ford and GM merging and buying CJDR as their first order of business.
Trendy Motor Road Cars Driven Weekly. Subscribe now.
> MotorTrend Group will expand Hearst’s collection of brands
I worked in publishing, aka the ostensible content between the ads in print media, for one hot minute, and the use of “brands” in that world makes me want to vomit violently.
I used to do layout and logo work for publishers and I the reason why I always used the excuse of “My webcam is broken” in meetings is because the moment somebody went into the whole “The brands have to align vertically” speech I’d get up from my chair and leave until that person stopped talking. It always made me so angry that actually good ideas (which people would on pitches for for days) that would differentiate things and provide a sense of individuality for readers or users got shot down because it didn’t look “grey” enough to fit into the amorphous blob of the “brand.” Ask us for all these insane qualifications, pay us for work ostensibly nobody outside of our skillset could do, and then tell us to shut up and use Calibri and the two column layout or else we’d have to redo it all without getting paid for the scrapped work.
It’s been six years and just remembering it made me angry again.
Rosebud…
I have so many magazines in my house, and I was just starting to adjust to the new fancier paper slightly larger issues with reduced quarterly frequency. I enjoy having a thick, shiny, magazine surprise arriving a few times a year. My fear is Hearst will merge Motor Trend and Car and Driver since they have so much overlap in feature content. It would be sad to lose either of these storied publications. Maybe I’ll be wrong and consolidation will help them all survive. Road and Track certainly found a new Niche to focus on.
“Road and Track certainly found a new Niche to focus on.”
Unfortunately one out of three issues is of interest to me.
I’m not subscribing to R&T, they have a Niche, I’m just not part of the Niche, sounds like you also might not be
When they hit a theme I like, they’re great. It doesn’t happen enough though.
Actually if 6 do any investigation you can get any magazines or as many magazines as you want for free. It allows the magazine to claim readership. It is like the old AOL Disks
Car magazines were predominantly read by men. Men don’t read for pleasure much anymore for some weird reason that nobody can figure out. Growing up, all my friends’ dads read novels (Ludlum, Clavell, Talese, etc) and magazines (Popular Science, Road & Track, Time, Sports Illustrated, etc). That has apparently nearly stopped. I wish I had a hot take on this, but I’m stumped.
We read plenty, its just all online now, 25+ years ago, The Autopian would have been a physical magazine, showing up in your mailbox every month. Blogs are the new magazines.
Journalism outlets like traditional print magazines that also have a large online presence aren’t suffering because readership is declining. It isn’t. It’s because Google and Facebook keep so much of the ad revenue for themselves.
Have you ever gone from Google search to a website and paid attention to the URL? If you pay attention, you’ll sometimes see the URL doesn’t start with the website you are visiting, it’ll start with google.com/amp.
“Accelerated Mobile Processing”, like Facebook’s Instant Articles, is a way for those companies to show you other websites’ content without actually sending you to those sites. Because if you’re staying on Google’s website, they don’t need to share clicks or ad revenue.
It’s straight-up corporate piracy.
There is (or was) a plugin for Chrome and Firefox called AMP Killer. Since all of the AMP versions of pages are caches (often that haven’t been updated with redactions or other information after the initial capture by the web crawler) what you’re looking at is a copy of the page that Google has applied internal metadata to. That metadata is used to further shape your advertising profile. T
he part that really sucks is that user statistics that webmasters need in order to properly maintain the site such as bounce rate and view duration (needed to gauge things like what’s necessary to fight bots or to figure out if page load is too heavy) don’t get recorded in the administrator’s panel and the original site suffers from malicious traffic.
AMP Killer and others like it were designed to get to the original page in order to stop them from stealing traffic and from collecting that data. So much of the modern web is based on stealing and gatekeeping and all of the infrastructure is collapsing under that weight. The modern tragedy of the commons.
Going to look that up. I’ve made a habit, although annoying, of copying the actual address and pasting into a new tab. And addon will be nice…
I haven’t had a car rag come to the house regularly in over a decade at this point. I can’t pinpoint any one reason, they just stopped being my interest. Sad though, since I grew up looking forward to that next issue in the mail. I still subscribe to Roadracing World for motorcycle stuff but that’s it.
I probably had 10 different car mag subscriptions when I was a kid in the 90’s/early 00’s. The beginning of the month when they showed up in the mailbox was such an exciting day. I guess that was my dopamine hit before social media.
Thank God for Collectible Automobile, even if it is taking over my condo. Long may it survive.
I don’t have a lot of copies because I only came across it shortly before deciding to stop buying magazines altogether to cure my addiction, but Collectible Automobile is fantastic – when you read an article on a particular model, you easily got the impression that this was the best, definitive deep-dive detailed article on that model of car you were ever likely to read.
I’ve got most of the entire run, and it is truly a treasure. With the knowledgeable and responsive readership, if the article wasn’t absolutely comprehensive, the next issue’s letters to the editor will make it so. And the continued commitment to a quality format (looking at you, C&D) is refreshing.
Unlike many posters here, I’ve loved having magazines to read since my first Motor Trend in 1964. I’m very sad about the losses that are accumulating in print automotive magazines. Now Hemmings Classic Car is going away too, being incorporated in their marketplace magazine. For me it’s a big loss
Yeah. 🙁 I love print, dang it! I just can’t afford that many subscriptions, so the ones I get are either issues I’ve bought out of boredom or ones I get through memberships of other things.
(PCA’s mag kicks ass, though. I will be truly livid if anything ever happens to Panorama.)
I mean, I used to be big into Car and Driver’s magazines growing up. My grandma even paid for the subscription every year for it because I just engulfed myself into each new issue, probably multiple times a week for the same issue!
Sadly, their bias seemed to be very enforced as time went on, so I decided to stop getting new issues unless it had something pretty cool on it. But even then, the bias got into those articles too, and it just wasn’t worth it to pay money for new issues.
I used to get issues of Import Tuner & Super Street, but I kinda got sick and tired of reading those years ago. Anymore, I see if there’s any Mopar Action or other Mopar magazines.
Reading the big publications isn’t fun anymore, honestly.
That’s so funny! My grandma paid for my Car & Driver sub in the 1990s, too! People can’t believe how exciting it was to get that in the mail every month with Z car foldouts, ZR-1 reviews, Ferrari F40s and the 10 best roundup every year. A 4WD turbo GMC pickup that could beat a Corvette in the rain? You got it! A Chevy work truck with a 454 big block? Done! It was THE era for no expense spared engineering excellence and the writers were really great. Damn.
I havne’t subscribed to any US magazines for years. I did subscribe to Evo for a couple of years, but it gets repetitive – only so many supercars and Porsche 911s to go around. Then I tried Octane for a change of pace, but that was too much rich-people-in-Monoco. The magazine you get with Hagerty insurance is actually pretty good.
The Intercooler is what you want. Best writers in the business and in addition to journalists they have engineers and designers that tell stories that you will love. (your comment mirrors me exactly and The Intercooler is the one subscription I will never give up, their podcast is great even if the audio quality isn’t the best)
For me this is no loss. Motor Trend has always focused on regurgitating press releases and pumping up new products, even if they are crap. Anyone remember when they were briefly shilling extended warranties?
Oh gosh, they’ve put their name on a little bit of everything lately. I think the Porschelump’s car cover was MT-branded even though [higher-up editor, not Kristen or any former coworker] is a grade-A snobby-for-no-reason wanker.
(Maybe he’ll retire in the corporate shuffle.)
You’re not wrong, how many times have we seen Motor Trend branded floor mats, cigarette lighter doodads, seat covers, probably hemorrhoid cream too.
Jonny Lieberman.
The less said about him the better.
Have to say, I’ve never cared for Jonny.
Yep, back when I subscribed to auto magazines, MT was the bottom of the barrel. I read C&D, R&T, and automobile magazine, as well as 4×4 and muscle car/hot rod type magazines. At one point in time I had 1000s of magazines on my shelf, but decided after a move that I wasn’t reading them and was tired of hauling them around – so I took them all to the dump.
MT was /is rubbish. 50yr + CD and RT subscriber here. MT never tested a car they did not like. As worthless to me as JD power.
Dumped all my subscriptions in the late 70’s. Did the hot rod, car craft, automobile, motor trend. Was to busy with uni and then family and work to get back into them. Jumped into the internet cars domain in the 90’s and have seen the rise and fall of many blogs and sites.
“Jumped into the internet cars domain in the 90’s and have seen the rise and fall of many blogs and sites.”
Me too. Sadly the very last of the internet car forums I was a regular contributor to (Hemi6Packs, an Australian Chrysler forum) has just died in the past few weeks after the untimely death of the guy who previously rescued it by buying it from the original owners. Traffic to the forum had already dwindled to a small group of posters trying to keep it active and relevant, and after his death there was an effort made to try to keep it running by paying the hosting fees, but nobody could access the back end of the forum without the relevant passwords, and it seems it was eventually allowed to die since the effort required to try to resurrect it wasn’t justified due to the low traffic to the forum.
Motor Trend used to be so good in the early 2000s. I loved the head to head series on YouTube with Jonny and Jason. Once they took that away and made you pay for their own streaming services to watch their content, I was done with them. They’ve also got noticeably worse journalism wise. Typos, absurd statements, writers who no nothing about cars, and no big test articles.
Absolutely! Things stumbled noticeably downhill when they started pushing the streaming service.
Yup! It was a great mag when Angus Mckenzie was in charge. Once Ed Loh took over in mid-late 00’s the content quality crashed. It’s only gotten worse since then.
As a preteen in the ‘60s my dad subscribed to Motor Trend. So that mag is what started my written car culture education. In the proceeding years i learned to appreciate- and tire of- the mindsets off all motor mags. None the less I read them all. Before the internet a monthly mag was your path for what’s new.
I’m okay with this. We are in the dying days of print media and that’s the truly sad part of this. I had a C/D subscription for 15+ years and it only stopped because of C/D not renewing it. Of course it always bothered me that they would drop the most recent issue like a full month ahead (i.e
October would be out in the beginning of September) and news stands would get their copies roughly 2 weeks before us paying subscribers.
On this note, it would be super neat if this site would drop an annual book with previous years articles, plus bonus material. Make it a pre-order item to gauge interest and print demand. Signed copies for Corinthian Leather subscribers.
a book . . . is a pretty neat idea. Blog writing isn’t the same as book writing, but with a ghost writer thrown in the mix, it would be really fun to revisit some of the narrative arcs from years past–DT contributes so many. =)
I think that it’s definitely possible… remove the word ‘blog’ and it’s a bunch of short stories. It’s gotta contain photos (more than are shared here), but it could be marred by 10w-30 hands and I wouldn’t care.
So will they re-launch the shows? Or are they lame?
Its pretty reasonable to assume that the shows were part of the discussion for the buyout, and the termination of the shows was likely driven by the outcome of those discussions. My guess? Motortrend didn’t want Roadkill.
IIRC, the shows were previously spun off to a totally different video-focused entity, which was where the “Motor Trend TV is shutting down, but not print/online Motor Trend” confusion came from. So, unlikely. Maybe they could pick up the show IP, but they’d have to find a new channel/streaming service for it since WB/Discovery is done with it.
So I guess my bid of treefiddy was not accepted?
Well, my ball of lint and a rusty paperclip wasn’t accepted. (A damn crying shame, too, given that I wanted to pivot to Cayennes.)
They didnt want no godddamn lochness monster running their magazine. Saw right thru your girl scout disguise
Print media has been slowly dying, so it doesn’t surprise me to see this acquisition. Hot Rod magazine which has been around since 1948 changed from monthly to quarterly earlier this year. Nowadays you can find just about anything on the internet, but there still is a nice feeling to just sit and flip thru the pages of a magazine.
Maybe Cox should jump in.
There must be some dormant publications they could revive.
They certainly would get the attention on the industry side immediately, and they are as big a media company as , well they are very big.
Maybe put Jamie Kitman in charge of editorial?
Hey Jim, please?