Peter Vieira
Wow, you're reading this? Thanks! If you're into RC cars and I seem vaguely familiar, it's because I spent over 25 years writing and editing RC car news, reviews, and tech articles in print and online. What else, what else ... I have a degree in Film Studies (useless), most of a degree in Graphic Design (useful), and I'm married to a wonderful woman with horrible taste in men. Thanks to her, we have a terrific daughter who just earned her Journalism degree and is way, waaay more together that I was at her age. Or right now.
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Are autopian readers “normal people” ? Ice racing headline 100%
With enough data collection you will be able to divide us into groups based on our hed preferences. Yay!
Glad the A/B test worked out, that was the best version and all others were wrong this time.
I love ICE pic got me good
I’ve noticed this sort of paradox-seeming thing over the years for sure. You’re in a place where you’d think most of the people there would have a pretty strong interest in motorsports. Talk about rally on Subaru forums. Talk about big e-sports racing event on Gran Turismo forums. Talk about sports car racing stuff on a Toyota GR forum. Meanwhile there is basically no article/thread one can publish to get lower engagement within those communities than anything talking about motorsports.
The general consensus was right, didn’t click, so there ya go.
I absolutely clicked on that in large part because of the ice racing in the headline, as one anecdata point.
However, I wish you would spend less time arguing about ice racing and more time making sure the headlines aren’t total clickbait. That Aston/Corvette one, since you called it out, was kind of shitty. I clicked expecting that either Aston had introduced an entry-level model (although re-reading it I realize that was my mistake), or that you were comparing them to a ZR1 or something. But no, it was “used cars are cheaper than new cars, LOL”. I’m not sure it was worthy of a story at all, and even if it was I felt misled by it.
And there have a couple of other egregiously misleading titles lately. That one about the GM oil change in the 6.2L fiasco, that implied it was a result of the federal investigation when it very clearly was not, was one that sticks out for all the wrong reasons. Maybe it got you enough clicks to be worth it, but it hurt my perception of the site.
I know there are going to be bad titles from time to time (we’re all human and imperfect, after all), but it seems like there have been more lately in a short time period than usual.
Ironically it appears that fewer and fewer are caring about NASCAR also,let alone ice racing.
Death by committee! Okay that’s hyperbole and the down select process is important, but I imagine it gets tiring at times.
On an unrelated note: is Mercedes’ profile pic from The Sims?
My Slack profile picture is usually a random illustration from an airplane safety card.
I think my current one came from a Frontier Airbus A320?
Dang, I wasn’t even close. Your method is way better though. Does look Sim model-level-quality at least.
Oof, this is like writing a novel except instead of my own brain overthinking ten different ways to construct a sentence and an editor to maybe point out the need for an eleventh option, you’ve got a dozen people overthinking ten different ways to construct a headline. Of course, a sentence gets lost among thousands of others and a headline needs to grab people all by itself (maybe this is more akin to figuring out the beginning of a novel).
I admit I’m one of those people that tend to skip racing articles. For whatever number of reasons, I just don’t have much interest in racing. Tactical driving, sure, but I don’t want anyone getting into an ambush scenario for an article.
Writing headlines for print ratchets up the challenge. Let’s say you have a one-column front page slot for a story with three lines for the hed and no allowance for a subhead below it. The article’s about Greenland, and you’ve got seven characters max on each line. It’s like a crossword puzzle with a tight deadline plus a scrum of other editors weighing in, and editors are not constitutionally inclined to leave things unquestioned. It’s fun but it’s a team effort and you have to get used to seeing your darlings get cut.
That last part is no different from writing novels, though there are various reasons things have to go. Like design or probably any creative field, if you’re too precious about your creations or can’t take criticism, there’s probably a better career option out there for you. It can be rough and it’s definitely not for the weak of heart.
A good compromise might be to send one of the writers to an EVOC or Pursuit course.
Enjoyed this article, but still not intrigued enough to click the reference article.
I have no idea what ice racing is or why it might be interesting. I’m sufficiently satisifed knowing: things went better than expected.
“Ice racing” is definitely part of why I clicked, because that’s a pretty weird thing to do in an A8 that you just bought. The “beat the snot out of it” thing is less appealing. Anyone can buy a used car and beat the snot out of it. Ice racing though? That’s weird, tell me more! Also, I’m not sure how I feel about this “nobody cares about racing” line of thinking.
Same, I 100% will click any Autopian article containing the words Ice Racing.
I definitely was drawn to “ice racing” because it *sounds* more like “having fun with cars” than “a sanctioned event with ranked outcome.” I’m just not a sports person. There’s a huge gulf between liking cars and caring about which car and team outperformed another on one occasion.
Your read on the headline closely matched mine: I was interested in the A8 as an odd duck for ice racing, and the idea of driving a cheap car hard seemed less than novel and kind of a given in the context of the article.
Content wise: amateur racing > professional racing.
I’ll definitely click the former, but the latter only if it’s technical detail about LeMans prototypes or something nifty like that.
Yep! Totally there for the ice racing aspect. And the thought of doing it in a 200K mile A8 just added to the appeal. That sounded like a really fun/ludicrous thing to do. A lot more fun than ice fishing IMHO. Ludicrous. Hmmm. Can Tesla ice racing be far behind?
If I ever thought I had a chance at being a professional journalist, this article has proven that I in fact do not have what it takes. The conversation gave me anxiety, I’m too analytical or something.
Unrelated, what happened to Ski Klasse is it dead?
I just hope this was just a particularly cranky session. I worked as a newspaper reporter for a little over a year after college (many years ago) before a photographer position opened up. Writing headlines for print media (with hard physical limits) was probably harder than it is for web sites, but I was glad that it was the copy and layout editors’ job and not mine.
I would not dismiss the idea based on this particular discussion, or more general, the art of writing record-clicking-headlines. I would say writing the article is a different skill than coming up with the headline, the same as that making photos for an article takes a different skill than doing the layout. As long as you are fine with accepting that somebody else decides what headline suits your article best, why not give it a chance.
I’m still recovering from my past job, which was basically 90% writing. One of my last projects had a reviewer that was both very difficult to please, mostly absent, and I had to jump on the grenade with the customer; regularly. I’m still mad about it, this is a ME thing though and probably part of my knee jerk reaction here.
It sounds more like a not-you thing, but a someone-else thing. Regardless the type of work, you will work with people who you don’t click with, and that can result in very stressful situations, with less-than-perfect results. I used to feel really bad when that happened, thinking it was a me-thing. Once I realized that I could work without problems with 9 people, and the 10th I had a difficult time with, than, maybe, I wasn’t the problem. At least not completely. And realizing that alone made it more easy to focus on working with the 9 pleasant people, with the bonus that knowing who the 10th was resulted in let’s say less friction and more efficient working with the 10th. (Pls see this comment as a way to support you.)
I appreciate this, and you are right; my failing was in managing the expectations from our customer.
Being hung out to manage that without support made it worse, and as the face of the project I feel like I was made to look incompetent to the customer, which can have lasting effects in my very small industry circle. I have moved on to a completely different role and no longer have to work with this individual at all, so things are better.
What I am more impressed is getting an Audi A8 that cheap and it works.
An Ice race between a Audi A8 and a Nissan Cross Cabriolet would have got more clicks… Does anyone know if Lake Michigan is frozen? There may be an opportunity to really test the XPEL protection film
I just read that Lake Erie (the shallowest of the Great Lakes) is 95% frozen for the first time in years. I don’t know about Lake Michigan.
As someone who doesn’t care about racing in general, and who rarely clicks on any racing story, I can confirm that I will click on any story about ice racing or demolition derby, or any of those weird types of racing being done by an amateur.
I realized while reading this that I can’t remember the last racing article I clicked…I do know I didn’t read the article described herein.
I honestly don’t know why that is upon self-reflection. They all sound theoretically interesting
Only people who really want to know how the sausage gets made read this article.
So, truth be told, I click on nearly every article every day, but I got the “beat the snot out of it” headline and didn’t click it because beating the snot out of a vehicle doesn’t necessarily imply racing. However, had it mentioned ice racing I’d have gladly clicked it. I suspect many Autopians have a certain level of automotive sympathy, and not specifying why something is being beaten on just leaves a sour note.
“The beatings will continue until morale improves”
I had a boss whole loved that saying. One time in an all-hands meeting he said it in response to complaints from several of my outspoken coworkers. The next week corporate announced layoffs and morale improved very, very quickly.
Was he among those laid off?
No, but that would have been fantastically ironic.
That kind of content can be polarizing. My dad hates ”destructive testing for lulz” shows like Roadkill but I appreciate the “see where they break” aspect. Those particular vehicles are generally the sort he’s familiar with and he knows what breaks, so changing the channel is sorta his version of checking doesthedogdie.com before watching Old Yeller.
Oh, that’s fascinating! I’ve always wondered how our A/B testing system works, and I guess it works by offering both headlines at the same time. I wonder how it chooses what headline what user sees?
I’d be curious to know as well. Sounds like an idea for a future article!
You think Torchinski is joking about the boxing, but I have seen him wrestle the head of the local college young republicans in front of several hundred people… and win! You should ask him about it.
I want this to be real.
It is and it was glorious
Tell us more…….
It’s been a very long time, so I might miss in some details. But there was a member of the student congress who was, at the time, an asshole amongst asshole, I mean you really had to work to be as hated as he was and stand out for being awful in student government. Torch called him out in a column and challenged him to a wrestling match in a central area on campus so a lot of people would watch. IIRC torch won, 2 out of 3 falls. There was even a celebrity referee. It was very WWE-ish but I think they were really fighting.
Not putting too many details out there because it’s been a while and memories fade also don’t want to steal any thunder from torch
Meanwhile – Did anyone go to the Rivian R2 preview drive?
And have you seen the Skoda Vision O and the Canadian Borealis concepts?
I think racing headlines fail because the people who care about racing generally care about particular types of racing. Also, while I love to watch racing, I don’t get much entertainment from reading about what happened in the race.
A: Hilarious. B: I’m sad so few care about racing as someone who cares about racing.
Given that you guys clearly put lots of time, effort and attention into getting posts noticed, how about reworking your subheds? Instead of just showing the randomly-cut off intro sentence of the post, which almost never includes enough words to actually complete a thought, write up a true subhead that tells us what the post is going to be about.
That subhed is automatically generated. It looks like we can manually create subheds (I just tested the functionality), but the manual subhed then adds an additional subhed into the post itself that isn’t compatible with the site’s current visual theme. I’ll look into this some more!
Sounds like a pretty easy edit to the article template though.
Nobody cares about ice racing? How about Ice Boating? This was a big thing on the lake I grew up on, Lake Winnebago, which is very large and also shallow, which means that it freezes over almost every winter.
“The official ice boat speed record is generally recognized as 143 mph (230 km/h), set in 1938 by John Buckstaff in The Flying Dutchman (often referred to as Debutante) on Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin. While this record is sometimes disputed, modern high-performance ice boats (Skeeters) regularly achieve speeds of 80–100+ mph in suitable conditions. ”
The ice is also usually thick enough to drive cars on, which accounts for the first-ever Ice Bar that opened 1 mile offshore this season.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD02lorq360