The Autopian is always looking to dig into great stories happening around the car world — and we’d love your help finding those. Whether it’s happening in your neighborhood, or whether you’re seeing cool stuff on Reddit, car forums, Twitter, Facebook, or your local paper, we’d love you to send us tips/ideas so we can investigate. It’s one of the best ways (other than membership) that you can support this site; here are some guidelines for the types of tips we’d love to receive from you.
Tips have always been a huge way that journalists find some of their greatest stories. Someone will send an email about something they saw on some car forum, or something happening in their own life, and a journalist will use that as a starting point to dig further. Sometimes the tips are about deep investigative pieces, and sometimes they’re just about some cool car build someone found on some random forum. Big and small, tips are a huge help for us here at The Autopian, a small outfit that is always trying to improve its efficiency.
Types of great tips (which we’d love you to send to tips@theautopian.com) include:
Great Human-Interest Stories
This is our priority: Human-interest pieces. If you’ve seen someone doing something cool — again, either locally or on an internet page that you frequent — please let us know. Stories about people are among our favorites, so if please keep us in mind as you browse the web these days!
A few examples of stories we’d love to dig into: people building insanely-engineered cars, people getting involved in controversies (HOA stories are the classic), people showing their expertise on some weird and fascinating car feature we didn’t know existed, people finding rare cars in improbable places — just anything interesting involving people.
NEWS
Anytime we can be first to news, it’s a huge help for us. If you learn about something new, whether it’s via a primary source (which is gold) or via your local news channel, send it our way! If it’s already on other big sites, chances are, we’ve seen it, but stuff you’ve learned about in your own circle could be great things for us to dig into further and share with the broader community.
Leaks Of New Cars, Like This:
This was a tip from a friend, who saw these photos from an anonymous photographer. We love to show our readers new things.
Weird Cars You’ve Found
This incredible 1990 Ford Tempo for sale on Facebook Marketplace was emailed to us by a reader.
This tip came from my friend Jamie, who actually took the photos above of those rustbuckets in Michigan.
I’m not sure that Camaro/Jeep/S10 came from a tipster, but someone did later Tweet it out to me, so to whoever that was: Thank you!
Quirky History Stuff
If you’re a weirdo like us, browsing through old car magazines and newspaper clippings and brochures, I bet you happen upon some strange stuff, like the in-car hotdog sizzler shown above. Send that kind of thing our way!
If you send us a tip to tips@theautopian.com, and that tip yields an article that brings gangbusters pageviews, we’ll even send you a prize as a thank-you! And the most-read tip-based story of the year will get a special prize.
“The Cake is a lie”
ALWAYS CHECK RPOs WHEN BUYING USED CARS!!!! 99.9% of people don’t know that OEMs put RPO stickers on vehicles or what an RPO is. Please buyers, make sure you know what you’re buying.
Tips. It’s not just Spit spelled backwards.
For some reason this offer reminds me of that chick I met in the bar one night.
Despite her offer of a “prize”, I did not send her a picture of my wang…
What about all my Cadillac society tips I’ve sent?
At least two of them have been mildly interesting 😉
Time to scour even more web forums!
Hahah
You’re not getting rid of the Aztec that easily, buddy.
I think that’s the prize for least helpful tip. It’s motivation.
They can’t get rid of it until they’ve flown me over to drive it, for another ‘force Adrian to eat his words’ article.
Insist on Business Class. For the article!