How Are We Doing? Let’s Talk Autopian

One of my favorite comments I get from PR people, journalists, other publishers, et cetera is that they can’t believe the community we have here. That’s what the Internet used to be about, but too many publications got sold to people who didn’t understand that a site like this can only thrive with readers who care. It’s why so many of our peers look at the quality and number of comments we have and express some mix of shock, envy, and disbelief.

This is a good week for media in general, because we celebrate the fifth anniversary of Defector. While this site may have formed under different circumstances and with slightly different goals, the success of Defector was encouraging to those of us who felt there had to be a way back to websites that didn’t suck.

In his celebration post, Tom Ley (who was the one who encouraged us to do a Velour tier, btw) wrote the following:

I often tell people that I think about being a co-owner of Defector the same way I would think about being the co-owner of a bar. Nobody opens a bar because they are hoping that one day Viacom will come along and try to purchase it for $250 million, and no bar becomes a fun place to hang out by hiring bartenders who for some reason won’t stop telling customers that starvation is no big deal when it happens to sick kids. Part of what makes Defector work is that it aims to accomplish much of what a good bar aims to accomplish: It welcomes patrons into a place where they might have a few laughs, learn a few things, and pass the time a little more pleasantly than they otherwise would.

This isn’t to say that Defector harbors no ambition. One often overlooked aspect of the media industry of yore is how it was built to drain itself. It was simply understood that as bigger audiences were courted and larger valuations were achieved, the more degraded and compromised the actual editorial product would become. It was like having a vampire in your own company, feeding itself on the very thing that originally provided any life or value to the enterprise. By contrast, these years spent working at Defector are the first in my career in which the future is not something I feel bearing down on me, but rather something to be chased after. We’ve already grown a lot as a company, and I want us to continue to grow, but not recklessly. If you’ll allow me to return to the bar analogy: I don’t want Jon Taffer coming in here and turning the place into a 9/11-themed sports bar with fire truck alarms above all the urinals. I just want more and different customers, so that we can offer a more adventurous drink menu and, I don’t know, turn the back room into a music venue. OK, that’s it for the bar analogy.

This feels right to me. I want this place to be a fun place to “pass the time a little more pleasantly” than you otherwise might. At the same time, I think we all have an ambition to grow this place and make it more than it is right now.

To that end, we’ve made two strategic hires:

• Brian Silvestro, our new News Editor, who is already making a huge difference when it comes to keeping us up-to-date on what’s happening.
• Griffin Riley, our Video Manager, who is continuing to expand our video offerings.

These last two weeks we’ve experimented with increasing our daily production a bit, while also improving or adding some site features (Night Panel, Glovebox). We’ll also be replacing the current Consent Management Platform (CMP) that a few of you didn’t like with one that should work a little better and be a little less intrusive.

The site’s looked great to me this week, but I’m curious what everyone else thinks. How are we doing? How are you doing? What could we do better? What should we do more of?

Photo: Ford