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Seems reasonable.
This kind of thoughtfulness and principles make this place such a quality publication I’m almost proud to support, however measlily with my cheap subscription.
Yes, I wrote measlily. Twice. Now it’s a word.
This is like a Facebook forms post.
For someone who has been writing on The Internet as long as you have, I’m surprised you still hold this level of faith in people. There’s a non-zero count of people who literally base their personality on whatever Musk does/says, so I 100% believe there are too many people that also believe this header.
I appreciate and agreed with your “ethics first” approach.
Good call on this one…and count me in as someone who likes to get little glimpses of how this site operates. My membership dollars are being spent quite well!
My local news channel is always quick to send cameras out when there’s a crash significant enough to block traffic. One morning, they were reporting live when the camera guy decided to zoom in for a closer look at the wrecked car, and ended up focusing on what turned out to be the remains of the driver.
Interesting “inside baseball” take on your editorial processes and ethics. I commend you for the decision you made and the reasoning behind it. I like the “Double-E Rule,” and it does not strike me at all as hypocritical for you to do the interview with local station KHOU. It’s nice that they left the condolences part of your interview intact. You’re correct that this accident would probably have been covered at a local level even if it had been an F-150.
When more information becomes available, as it inevitably will, will you publish a story if the root cause is driver error? Or only if the evidence shows it was a fault of the vehicle itself?
It’s so refreshing to see a media outlet that holds their integrity above the clickbait pressure. Thanks for giving us a glimpse behind the curtain and restoring a small bit of my faith in humanity!
did i just get paywalled… it feels like i got paywalled.
Schrödinger’s article.
Excellent reasoning and I agree completely. Kudos, team.
Hmm, seems like this IS an article about the Cybertruck Fatality and to me comes across as worse than if you just would have done an article on the crash in the first place.
Counterpoint: as a working journalist who every day gets calls from our audience wondering why “the media” aren’t reporting on some story or other (as if we’re some giant monolith rather than a bunch of imperfect humans who can’t even agree on lunch), I can imagine that DT and the rest of the masthead have probably gotten emails asking “how come you’re not covering the fatal Cybertruck crash? YOU MUST BE IN THE TANK FOR EL*N!” This acknowledges that the story exists, explains The Autopian’s thought process about it, and doesn’t try to exploit the crash for views (notice that there’s not a single link in the article).
I appreciate the transparency and the explanation, even as I acknowledge that “reporting on the reporting” is especially fraught.
I do understand your point. It certainly is possible that they did receive some “why didn’t you cover…” However if that was the driving force behind this article I would have expected that to be mentioned.
It’s a member post meant to help our most loyal readers see the behind-the-scenes thought process that goes into story generation. It’s not a story that’s going to be read by tens of thousands, as it’s limited to members.
Thank you for sharing this.
It is a ghoulish drive in some individuals to be first to report someone was killed, driving a cybertruck or any other vehicle, without some sensitivity to what that means.
Tragedy drives some sad people to turn others into footnotes or answers to trivia questions, to fulfill their own empty need to be the first to get credit, or to express their own vitriol towards Musk, cybertrucks, their owners, etc.
There will now be an empty seat at a table at holidays, and a lot of potential promise of that person is now gone. I feel for this person’s loved ones and hope they do eventually find some peace despite this loss.
Decency and critical thinking are on the list of why Autopian is amazing, as shown by staff and commenters too.
I’m just glad there is a group of reasoned adults somewhere thinking about what to publish.
We appreciate your effort to maintain standards and integrity.
The aviation community loves to dissect any and all plane crashed. While care and respect must be applied to all individual involved, the end point is always to create a learning experience. There are no new ways to crash a plane. So learning why, especially if pilot error, is always good to know.
really the same for motor vehicle accidents. And with EVs in general being new to much of the general public, the potential for learnings about post accident procedures has an upside.
I agree, but since we don’t know anything about the causes yet, there are no learnings to report.
The av-news industry, in general (not counting that Dan Gryder asshole) publishes information about crashes from a perspective of “don’t repeat whatever mistakes happened here.” Non aviation crashes, whether reported by car sites or the local TV station, rarely approach the story from that angle. It’s usually more of a “look what happened here” perspective rather than a “learn from this.” At best, if not wearing seatbelts or DUI were involved, we’ll hear about it and the implied message not to be that dumb yourself.
I mildly disagree with the idea that there are no new ways to crash a plane. We find new ways to crash planes all the time. Ask Boeing.
Before the 737 MAX, no one had ever crashed a plane because of a secret control-takeover system paired to a faulty single-point-of-failure sensor installed by a manufacturer who decided it no longer gave a flying fuck about keeping its customers’ passengers alive.
And because of the exhaustive reporting on that issue, Boeing’s moneygrubbing finance bro CEO got fired and replaced by someone with actual aviation and engineering experience who shows a real potential to turn the company around.
Almost every aviation safety rule is written in the blood of someone who died not following it. The difference is that aviation in general makes a concerted effort to make changes when the existing systems and procedures cause crashes (or even cause situations that might have but didn’t result in a crash). The automotive community often just points at the burning car and moves on with the day.
Despite the sensational reporting about aircraft crashes, there are always technical experts quietly trying to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent the failure in the future.
I don’t know if I can say the same thing about automotive crashes.
As a traffic safety professional, there are many ways to do crash reporting wrong: using the word “accident”, focusing on the road closure and resulting traffic, taking the police’s word for it on fault (especially survivorship bias in crashes with people outside of cars), fostering virtual rubberneckers with gore and drama, and even just treating people dying while getting to the grocery store as something routine and acceptable. I appreciate The Autopian’s stance on safety in general and especially with regards to street racing, excessive speeding, encouraging track use, autonomous vehicle tech, and cars’ impacts on cities and people walking and biking.
I particularly like your first point about not calling them accidents. If you’re doing something stupid when you crash, that wasn’t an accident, it was you intentionally being stupid.
I got T-boned a few years back by a teenager who snuck out of the house and drove 100 miles away to have a secret rendezvous with her online boyfriend. She was so busy paying attention to what they were getting ready to do that she failed to remember you need to brake before turning off a 65mph highway.
Her dad kept trying to get me to accept a cash payment for the damages from him because he didn’t want this little accident to raise her insurance rates. Nope, sorry. First, if I agree, you’ll see the repair bill and try to weasel out of the deal and second, it wasn’t little and it wasn’t an accident. Your stupid kid could have killed someone because sex was more important than driving, and this is a great opportunity to teach an object lesson that when you’re driving a 3,000 pound death machine, you should pay the fuck attention.
Cars and the people who drive it, who ride in it are mutually inclusive. Thank you for reminding us that cars add value to our lives, and that if a life is taken, they should be given respect as a person who lived. Kudos to the Autopian team for your editorial stand
Excellent decision. I’m proud to share my lunch money.
Seconded. Well reasoned and thought out. It’s interesting to get a glimpse at how the sausage is made.
Ethical standards like this are a large reason why I am a subscriber. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and the restraint.
Great breakdown David and the whole Autopian team. This kind of insight and explanation is what makes you all you. This article hits the 2 Es as well in showing us what goes on inside the Autopian newsroom.
Having spent the last part of my day combing through the medical records of a young person catastrophically injured in a motor vehicle collision, I appreciate your stance here. I had to read through their reports to get an insurance authorization started for what may be the first of many stages of rehabilitation. I say “may be” because their brain injury may ultimately make rehabilitation futile. Regardless of the circumstances that lead to the crash, the outcome is fucking tragic for this young person and their family. Even if they ultimately die of their injuries you probably won’t see anything about them in the news because these crashes happen all the time. Replace Cybertruck with Ram and David isn’t even having to explain why The Autopian won’t cover it.
Honestly, this is really good to see. I think anyone who has lost a friend or family member in an incident can appreciate the respectfulness of this take. You’re exactly correct in that it IS local news, but on a larger scale, it’s just a tragic inevitability. *Somebody* was eventually going to die in one, even if it was just having a heart attack while driving and putting it in a ditch; having nothing to do with the vehicle itself.
That being said, if a Lancia crashes in Idaho and I’m found in it, you all have my complete written consent to publish the following: “Andrea Petersen died in a high speed vintage Italian car crash.” Frankly, nobody would be surprised and I’ll have died doing what I love.
I appreciate you all for this. Too many people fall into the “well Someone would’ve sold those kids drugs if I didn’t” school of ethics these days.
Wait…a modern media outlet with STANDARDS!!??????!!!!!!!!???? Madness!!!