Full Circle

A bit over 10 years ago, my main sources for car entertainment and news were Top Gear and Jalopnik. I loved their more informal and somewhat snarky approach to automotive news, which was otherwise downright boring unless you were really interested in cars. I liked how they made it entertaining enough that even casual car enthusiasts could enjoy the stories. It’s certainly a trait I’ve picked up and continued in my own writing, and I’m not ashamed to admit I got it from them.

One day, out of the blue, I thought to myself, “I wonder if I could write something good enough to get published on Jalopnik?” At the time, they had the Oppositelock fan community where people could post whatever they wanted. Some tried their own hand at auto writing, and a few even joined the Jalopnik team, so I decided to give it a try. After writing something I was particularly proud of, I’d harass whoever the current editor on duty was on Twitter with a link to it. Eventually, I did get an article promoted to the front page of the site! And then it happened again. And again. I seemed to have a knack for this.

I never ended up joining the staff or formally writing anything specifically for Jalopnik. (I came close once, but it didn’t work out. No issues with anyone involved, and they explicitly permitted me to finish and publish the article on another website.) But I did join the crew of Right Foot Down, a small independent website that couldn’t pay, but it made for a fun hobby. They opened even more opportunities for me, like a couple of Ford press car loans (one of which I used as the course opening car at the Empire State Performance Rally) and admission to the New York International Auto Show press days.

One thing led to another, and I started writing news for The Drive, the first big website to hire me and the first to actually pay me for my work. My hobby was now a paying side gig, actively helping to fund my automotive and motorcycle hobbies. I did this for a while, then moved to RideApart to focus on motorcycles.

I left straight journalism for a while and joined the team at FIXD to write high-quality, informative articles about auto repair and maintenance, making the transition to full-time auto writing. During this time, I also started writing for ADVRider to stay in the motorcycle space. After a change of direction in what they wanted their website to be (and that’s all I’ll say about that), FIXD laid me off a couple of years later. At least a change in my role from writer to editor before the layoff gave me professional editing experience, which has helped me get through some lean times when bean counters have believed AI can write perfectly good articles for free so why pay human writers.

Anyway, it was at this point that I decided to go full freelance rather than look for another Full-Time Job (TM). (Not that any were really out there in this industry anyway.)

It did, in fact, pay off. I got multiple freelance gigs going, both writing and editing for various websites. I’ve been editing articles for Wikimotive since not long my last full-time job laid me off. Other gigs have come and some have gone, but between everything (and living cheap in a van), I’ve been able to live a life I love by making a living in a way I enjoy.

I started looking up the current selection of mainstream automotive websites to pitch a review of the Polaris Slingshot from an automotive point of view, since I already have the motorcycle angle covered at ADVRider. The Drive politely declined, and was kind enough to tell me so. A few others didn’t respond. Jalopnik no longer appears to have a “tips” email address, but while researching their current status (they’ve been through a few owners since Gawker Media collapsed), I saw they were hiring news writers. I applied on a whim, had an interview, and wrote a sample article for them. And now, I’m coming full circle and joining the Jalopnik crew as a News Writer starting tomorrow.

You’ll still be able to find me everywhere else I write, but I’m happy for the opportunity to dive back into car writing again. Motorcycle writing is great, but I like cars, too, and now I’ll get to do that as well. The fact that it’s where I got my start is the icing on the cake.