Five Minutes With….Matt Hardigree, Editor-in-Chief of Jalopnik
by GT August 27, 2014, Three:Eighteen pm Comments are off
Editor`s Note: My Life at Speed`s Greg Tracy had this conversation with Matt Hardigree several months ago, but as busy schedules would have it, we didn`t want this post to get lost. With the Jalopnik film festival coming up, the timing to post is ideal. Thanks Matt for your patience! ' CNaz
GT: I want to thank you for taking the time to get on board with us. We have been big fans of Jalopnik, always have been and always will be. I think it is cool you would talk to us and I appreciate that very much.
MH: Excellent thanks. We have had so much joy with you guys over dangling out with ‘us` and I thought it would be joy to come over and dangle with y’all.
Matt Hardigree, Ray Wert, & Mike Spinelli
GT: Yeah! We are excited to promote you on our end! I am going to ask you a few questions and with our “5 Minutes With….” we indeed attempt to keep the questions at about five minutes. Very first, tell me your name and a little bit about yourself and about what you do with Jalopnik.
MH: Sure, I am Matt Hardigree, Editor-in-Chief of Jalopnik, and I have been in that position for about a year and a half taking over from Ray Wert who had took over from Mike Spinelli and basically run what is typically considered the largest, most-read automotive website in the world…which is pretty awesome…writing about trucks, cars, fresh cars and old cars, yellow cars, donks and indeed whatever we find interesting at that particular moment.
GT: Right…and I think that is one of the things I have always loved, that there is a big variation of stories on Jalopnik. There is something for everybody, which is pretty cool.
Speaking to the diversity (of the content), when you look at how far you guys have come and what your daily viewership is, just tell me what your take is on the future of online magazines, blogs whatever you want to call it?
MH: The excellent thing about it, is that it now all dynamic. So it is always switching which makes it hard to categorize. Is it a blog, is it a website is it a network because now we (Gawker Media) have Truck Yeah! which is the truck site, we have Detroit, we have DOTS Jalopnik, Opposite Lock which is our off-topic forum. We have all these interesting spaces. We may even launch a plane site and possibly a motorsports one coming up, so it is an arousing time for us.
At very first, websites were very ‘niche`. For example, you could have a website about a specific type of fishing that you liked to do and certainly those websites still exist; and you could have a blog about it and get a petite amount of traffic, but as advertising has driven the prices down for every eyeball that you get, we sort of conglomerated, and there are still a lot of websites out there, but there [are] only a few truly big ones left. But I think we are moving into a point now where these larger websites can have sort of a greater range of things they cover with sub-websites, and that is where I see things going. Now, just looking at, just for joy, looking at my Google Analytics now, in the last thirty days we had about seven million unique visitors and seven million is a large number compared to what it was a duo of years ago. We have been growing a lot. The overall web and looking at our competitors, or not truly competitors but people in the same space like Road and Track, MotorTrend who has done a good job with movie, everyone has been growing. So I think that means there is a thick appetite for this kind of content and we are blessed to feed that appetite.
GT: Wow, that`s awesome! So do you think in terms of the future of automotive entertainment that you will see more of what you guys are doing? Embark having these “off-niche” brands? So somebody would come to Jalopnik and as they get deeper into it they may find that they are moved over to the 1960s Classics site for example?
MH: I didn`t even think of a 1960s Classics site yet, but that could be a indeed fine idea! We should do that! (laughs)
Yeah I do actually, it is not that dissimilar from what magazines did because, there are so many magazines because you think about a company like Now but Primedia before that, when it made sense to have a specific magazine on Sport Compact Cars, which I loved…I loved Sport Compact Cars which was one of my all-time dearest magazine, and they could have Hot Pontiac Magazine or whatever the sub-brands [there] were and almost all of those have gone away now, and have sort of been “sub-sumed” by the mothership, so there is MotorTrend and a duo of others. But now on the web, you sort of have the plasticity, where you can attempt things sort of like publishing became very profitable and expanded in the 80s and 90s you can do that on the web now. I think that what we are doing with sub-blogs, you see a lot with DRIVE and MotorTrend online is that they have sub-brands, for example DRIVE has “Tuned” for people who are in this range of tuner cars and they`ve got, you know, Mike Musto doing all of the Classic Hot Rods. You`ve got Chris Harris doing the European Luxury Cars and it is all still within the automotive space but the amount of advertising there, you sort of group into a network and there is money for it and there are certainly eyeballs for it. It takes pressure of one publication having to sort of, carry the flow for everything. It is also takes the pressure off of one puny site to get the volume of eyeballs that you need to get that minimum threshold to be successful, which is hard and it is most likely, you know depending on when you are talking about Quantcast or Google Analytics or any of the people who look at websites, you indeed need a user base of one million or two million people to, just hit that minimum threshold for making a living off of it.
GT: Segueing from the tuner culture that you mentioned, and a little bit off the subject line here (jokingly) where do you think you would find the best looking chicks in the pits? At the drift event, a NASCAR race, a Supercross event or an Indy Car race?
MH: Oh, got it! (laughs!) The best looking women at an event… (pauses) You know I have been married for five years, so I, should pretend that I haven`t noticed.
GT: You can actually pretend that you heard this from a friend of yours at Jalopnik. Somebody who was discussing (the topic) and you just happened to be walking by.
MH: Right. Got it! And it would be Travis. You know I, I, I have met a lot of lovely women at a lot of different events. It is hard to pick a dearest. My wifey was actually driving a crimson Dodge RAM pickup truck when I met her, so maybe at a truck pull. But she wasn`t at a truck pull when I met her, God forbid, but, albeit that would be frickin` awesome! (Matt was thinking hard for an reaction) Formula One events I would say that when Formula One was in Austin last year and I am biased `cause I am a Texan, so there was a lot of lovely Texas women at F1 but there were some knockouts at the race. Actually there were actually good-looking dudes and good-looking women. There was just good looking people in general. If you want to see people who spend a lot of money just to look good, you know, plastic surgery, individual trainers and people who were just naturally beautiful. Friggin` Antonio Banderas was walking around the pits and every driver has a supermodel gf…yeah, certainly F1 (is) what was I thinking.
GT: I was at the F1 race too and yes, it was pretty incredible in the looks department. Is there one article that stands out in your mind that stands out in your mind, since you have taken over the helm there at Jalopnik that has been one of your favorites?
MH: Oh man, yes! It is hard to pick just one because we have done so much stuff. It`s not like we drove across Europe looking for the best road kind of thing or even the cross country story which is truly cool, the sort of sensational story, about the dude who set the fresh Cannonball Run type record. It is actually one of Jason Torchinsky articles where his Volkswagen Beetle was stolen and it is the car he has had his entire life. He has possessed other cars like a Scimitar and some other weird stuff; but this car was a one thousand nine hundred seventy two Beetle that he got when he was sixteen or something like that, so years and years and years ago and he ended up with it stolen. And he was truly depressed about it, so he put up a quick note on Facebook and on Jalopnik telling “Hey if you see this car, let me know. It is indeed significant to me.”
And then somebody found a picture of it and posted it in the comments, but they didn`t post where the photo was taken. So, people knew that it was in the Los Angeles area, so somebody went to Google maps and found the exact house where the car was located. The engine had been stolen and a lot of the parts had been taken off, but the car was basically abandoned on this corner and our readers found it. So he calls the police and they rush over there and sure enough, he had lost the motor, the trim chunks, the headlights and the radio, which I am not sure the radio worked anyway, I don`t think, but it was his car and he got it back.
I think that is the ultimate Jalopnik positive story, of being able to help someone. We have helped other people find their lost cars too. But the entire community coming together is what we do that separates us, from everyone else. It`s not just because we, we sometimes use cuss words and we, you know we will write about things that other people won`t write about and we don`t play the same embargo system games. I think that a lot of people will tell me, and I don`t take offense to this, that they read Jalopnik because of the comments and I think that is a fine example of what a sturdy commenting community like Jalopnik that has 10s of 1000s of people commenting and what that can do.
“Here`s the most incredible thing about today: my prized Beetle has had its eyes gouged out, its spandex hood and decklid battered, it bumpers mangled, roof rack stolen, radio gone, and the entire engine fiercely extracted, and all I can think about is how amazingly wonderful people are.” ' Jason Torchinsky
GT: That is one of the things that I have truly liked about Jalopnik and one of the things that the internet has switched is that you do have the chance as an online magazine or a blog, whatever we call it to reach out and to get people to indeed feel like they are a part of the story and to bring them into it, which is maybe is why on that feature story you just talked about, people know what that feels like. They have had cars stolen or their friend’s car was stolen, it is like losing one of your best friends or a gf, you always kind of wonder what happened to them down the road when you think about it.
MH: Oh, absolutely I love that about the site, and we also have Opposite Lock, which is sort of like an off-topic forum kind of like the The Car Lounge on VWVortex and MC has Four Arms and on that sort of blog-type forum where you have to know someone to get signed up and I think we have something like one thousand eight hundred authors, who are more than just commenters. They are people who create their own content and their own posts and if you go to oppositelock.jalopnik.com at any time of day you will find people who are writing everything from Craigslist finds to indeed in-depth stories about buying used cars to indeed joy, good posts. That site alone does, according to Quantcast and sort of a different measure from Google Analytics, something like half a million people read that every month and that is something that the users just do for themselves. It is amazing!
GT: Right ' wow, that is amazing! So do you think we will ever be going to witness self-driving cars being raced around a track by themselves?
MH: Yeah, actually, I don`t know if you witnessed this but at Willow Springs the Stanford car that AUDI worked with, that TT car, which I think is the same car that went up Pikes Peak, raced around Willow Springs or maybe Thunder Hill and actually set a truly good time. You know, self-driving cars, people who love cars have a resistance to them because if you love driving you want to drive yourself and I certainly feel that way and I certainly can relate to that, but if it becomes an engineering challenge, then we sort of think about it differently.
Jason Torchinsky, did a truly superb chunk about a year and a half ago about if you think of it like a robot butler sort of thing ' when you think of the robot cars, so it is like something you have so you can play like Candy Crush while you are stuck in traffic, well, it is not indeed that compelling but if you think about it like KITT from Knight Rider, a self-driving car, and like having KITT would be freaking awesome! No one who loves cars would have a problem with having KITT. And to get there, you would sort of need the engineering challenges just like the original DARPA Race, where they had to race across the desert and I think that is the challenge. You know, like the same way we are doing with the Formula Electrified asking engineers to sort of “one up” each other in a race would be just super joy to witness…or a destruction derby (laughs) I would see either one.
GT: Excellent!! I think I am up for that too! Well, I know we have gone a bit over and I want to keep it good but one last thing, I was so honored to be part of the Jalopnik Film Festival. Do you see that happening again this year??
two thousand thirteen Jalopnik Film Festival
MH: Yes it is happening again and it will be fatter and better! The very first one was premised on that we could have the very first ticketed displaying of “RUSH” in the United States and there is not going to be a “RUSH” this year. So we were attempting to think of a way to make it more interactive, so this is a little teaser of what`s to come. This time it is not going to be just a bunch of old movies, hopefully this time we will actually produce some films and open it up to other people to do not just utter length films, but to do also brief films. I am indeed excited about that!
GT: Awesome! Well make sure you invite me back for that again…or I`ll just showcase up!
MH: Yeah, sure thing. (laughs) I`ll tell them at the door if Greg Tracy is at the door. Just let him in.
Jalopnik‘s Travis Okulski presents the discussion following Senna at the Jalopnik Film Festival. Panel participants include: Asif Kapadia, Director, and racers Greg Tracy and Robb Holland.