In Response to an Incident

I’ve got good news and bad news. Contrary to procedure, here’s the good news: Jeff Glucker’s going to be back in action here at Hooniverse.

I’d love to leave it at that and move on. In fact, I really don’t want to be writing this post right now at all. I’m supposed to be fixing an exhaust leak and a demon-possessed starter switch on my Falcon in preparation for the SoCal TT.

I’ll give you an out: if you know why Jeff’s back and don’t care to discuss it further, move on to the next post or click on the comments link and welcome him back. If you don’t care, click on to the next post. If you want to know the backstory and care how it affects us, click through.

The forensics are as follows: Jeff Glucker picked up some side work (in addition to his main gig with Autoblog) with a firm promoting a Nissan Versa marketing campaign. Was paid to send an email blast to a number of contacts about it, as it’s the type of thing industry news-centric sites and social media folk tend to run with. He also wrote a post about the campaign on Autoblog, pretty much regurgitating the standard media announcement. Someone forwarded the email to Jalopnik and Mike Spinelli ran a post pointing out the conflict of interest between the email and the disclosure-free post on Autoblog. Autoblog responded that they were unaware of the conflict prior to the post, then terminated Jeff’s contract over the violation.

Jeff’s a personal friend of mine, a great guy, and an incredible Car Guy. On a whim (with no tools, skills or garage space), he bought the car that eventually became the Uberbird, and he’s a major reason why I started Hooniverse on a whim almost exactly two years ago. Jeff is not a greedy, unscrupulous schemer.

When we met, he was making grownup money at NADAguides doing ad sales and writing reviews on the side. When he was laid off as the economy turned south, rather than take the next good business-y job that came along, he bit the bullet and took a position at Autoblog making a (small) fraction of what he used to. Why? Because the guy loves cars (and his wife is pretty tolerant). He’d rather crank out press-release news posts all day for the occasional opportunity to ride shotgun in a ViperACR on track than slave away in a cube farm at a comfy, reliable job. This is not something I’ve got the balls for.

But Jeff screwed up. He took an unauthorized side-gig, reached out to a bunch of people in a well-connected community, then wrote a post about it himself. There’s an obvious conflict of interest there, but most frustrating was how dumb of a move that was. Being a car guy at heart, I know he thought just writing about some ad campaign without endorsing it or the car was no big deal. It’s not like he was altering a recommendation or opinion at the behest of someone else. Seriously, who cares, right?

Unfortunately, this is a line you do not cross. On the whole, we in the automotive media ask you to look past our free review cars and all-expenses-paid trips and trust us to give our real opinions. Despite some alarmism, we’re hoping you recognize our enthusiasm for something new is based on our actual optimism for it. That optimism turns out to be unfounded, at least it’s unfunded. We trust you’re smart enough to see our take on something as just one of many, and recognize that your own experience is what matters. However, this whole hand-wavey argument pretty much falls apart when you’ve got a hand in each cookie jar, and both behind your back (how much farther can I stretch this metaphor?).

I want, badly, to lash out and argue over this. I’ve written and deleted several paragraphs in this spot; clarifications to misinformation, pontifications on how this is more about feeding off of drama than actually journalistic integrity…but I also suspect you’re not coming here to see more arguing on the subject. In fact it’s  probably the opposite, so rather than stirring the shit stew one more time, let’s all move forward. This probably won’ t be the end of all discussion on the subject in the auto blogging world, but it will be on this site.

Jeff’s back on board here at Hooniverse. Actually, he was always on-board, but now he’s back above ground and posting for us. I won’t be surprised if we catch flak for this, but that’s something I’m willing to accept. I suppose there are some who’d rather see him banished from The World of Cars for all time over this transgression. Personally, I strongly believe in the concept of forgiveness. Jeff knows he blew it. I’m willing to take him at his word and get back to the fun stuff.

That said, if we fail to learn from our mistakes, then we’ve failed in vain.  We’ve never had an explicit ethics/disclosure policy here, and that’s an error. From here on out, here’s our contract with you guys: Everything relevant will be disclosed. You’ll know who paid for our trips, and you’ll know what people’s relevant side-gigs are. If the site’s being used as a tool in someone’s marketing scheme, it’ll be obvious because I’m dead because content stays inside <–this box–> and advertising stays in the margins.

We’d like to pay our way for everything and buy/rent/steal all our review cars, but it’s simply not in the cards. We’re a crew of guys doing this in our spare time, and we think you’d rather have Nissan hook us up with a GTR or the Mullin Museum feed us dinner if that’s what it takes to bring you content. We can appreciate that some groups strive towards straight edge journalism, but these aren’t pacemakers we’re reviewing, they’re playthings. The end result of a pursuit of rational, passionless, ethically virginal automotive evaluation is Consumer Reports, but we’re pretty sure you didn’t come here to look for circle-dots, you came here for donuts. We’re not journalists; we’re car guys with a website who want to do cool stuff with cars and write it up for the world to see.

With Jeff back full time, joined by Kamil and the CarGuyDad crew, we think this is a great time for Hooniverse. We’ll be putting our extra resources to use to clean up the site and bring you, our beloved readers more of the stuff you love.

Tweet

No related posts.