The death of editor and publisher David E Davis Jr corresponds sadly with the decline of automotive print media.

Autoweek, Jalopnik, Autonews, and Autoblog provide more than sufficient coverage of current events. Forums like NICOClub, CadillacOwners, GMInsideNews, and VWVortex offer brand and model-specific interactive communities where people make friends, share knowledge, and meet up in person.

Edmunds and ConsumerGuide offer model overviews, specs, comparisons, and ratings with a depth and width that used to require the purchase of Consumer Reports’ annually published paperback book.

Well-circulated blogs like Peter De Lorenzo’s Autoextremist or the little shack on the information highway known as jesda.com give a single author’s perspective with a focused, personality-driven following.

And if you want your shiny car magazine on TV, you have Motorweek, Fifth Gear, and four international versions of Top Gear.

This leaves Car and Driver, Automobile, Motor Trend, and Road and Track with limited space to justify their existence. Web sites have taken over as primary sources of automotive information, echoing each other on Facebook and Twitter like 24-hour cable news broadcasts. The slower publishing cycle cannot keep up.

Traditional magazines have made half-assed efforts at maintaining an online presence, throwing together poorly formatted web sites with cheesy looking popup ads, infrequently updated blogs, and loosely connected online communities. You’ll get more popup, cursor chasing, and text-embedded ads on Caranddriver.com than some porn sites. Until recently, most magazines used their web sites as nothing more than teasers to sell the print version.

So if the competition is free, what reason is there to pay twelve dollars a year for a magazine that only arrives once a month and publishes information that’s three to four weeks behind?

I’ll tell you that reason: quality.

Quality of Writing
Writing about cars is harder than you think. How do you convey the slop and mush of a Toyota Camry to the general public? What illustration methods do you use? Are there metaphors your audience can relate to? If the Camry is mush, then what’s your definition of sharp?

An automotive writer has to contend not only with a wide and varied public, but his own standards as a reviewer which have to be defined and consistently maintained. I could tell you all day long about how cheap the interior of a Chevy Aveo is or how buttery the road feels from the seat of my Cadillac Seville, but it takes wordsmiths like David Davis and Brock Yates to turn mundane observations into meaningful thoughts and emotions.

A good writer has a distinct voice. When I, for example, read about one of Peter Egan’s road trips, I can imagine his inflection and the tone of his voice by the way he uses language. Guys like Ray Wert at Jalopnik do an admirable job of churning out casually written and perfectly readable daily material, but the finesse is missing.

And perhaps that has less to do with the quality of the author and more to do with the time frame of a monthly publication. Having 15 to 20 days to publish, edit, and research your material allows for more polishing and refinement.

The delay allows a traditional publication to offer better interviews, deeper comparisons, higher quality photos, and richer historical information than a hastily published blog. I know this because it takes me anywhere from two minutes to three hours to compile an article. That’s quite a difference from three weeks. I also have the option of going back and correcting my mistakes (I often do), so the concern for accuracy and quality is less.

Like most bloggers, I’m not a journalist, so I’m held to a much lower standard of objectivity and truth.

Quality of Media
In theory, a web site offers unlimited depth with the possibility of detailed pictures of nooks and crannies that you can’t see with an 11×9 inch piece of paper. You can’t zoom in on an interior shot of a Maserati Quattroporte and you can’t listen to the rumble of the Q’s Italian V8.

But there’s something real about holding a magazine, something official and substantive. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the Cadillac XLR. There was a preview story in Automobile Magazine in 2003, possibly late 2002. With child-like joy, I walked over to my girlfriend and her mom who were sitting in the living room, showed them the page, and said “Look at this. I love this car. What do you think of it? I HAVE TO HAVE IT. I WILL OWN THIS.”

I still haven’t owned my dream Cadillac, but I intend to. The four inch wide magazine photo sold me.

I currently subscribe to Motor Trend, Road and Track, Car and Driver, and Automobile through Zinio, an iPad/PC-based magazine viewer. For $7 a year, I can read whatever I want, whenever I want, from the palm of my hand. Unfortunately, a ten-inch tablet still requires scrolling and zooming to read all of the text.

Even on a 22” computer monitor, Zinio requires quite a bit of zooming. Electronic displays have limited resolution while glossy print tends to be sharper and easier on the eyes. The Zinio app is also quite slow, taking several seconds to jump from page to page, even on a new PC.

A paper magazine lets you flip carelessly through the pages, and each time you flip (usually while sitting on the can), you find something new. The sequentially organized ebook format translates poorly to magazines, encouraging the reader to work through the publication in order. Its a chore.

I do have a paper subscription to Nines, the owners magazine published by the Saab Club of North America. Nines’ basic production quality, personal stories, and unique photos make the issues somewhat collectible and cherished.

When my Zinio subscriptions come up for renewal, I will probably switch back to print.

Quality of Interaction
Compared to the cacophony of online content, the handpicked “Letters to the Editor” section is refreshingly sanitized, despite its obvious limitations.

A blog theoretically allows unlimited contributions from unlimited people, but who are you interacting with? You might get a dozen knowledgeable folks contributing to a discussion out of a thousand ignorant know-nothings who post because they love the sound of their voice, leading each other into a sewer of ignorance. Instead of one focused, polished, and coherent author with a clear direction, you get a bus load of angry drunks armed with megaphones and baseball bats.

Autoblog, for example, is knee-deep in trolls.

Discussions tend to devolve into left and right-wing politics, erroneously blaming everything in the universe on Bush and Obama.

Corporate Ownership
Its not all sunshine and roses at car magazines either. Today’s “auto rags” have declined in quality.

Media consolidation, even in the blogosphere, has diluted the honesty and sharpness of writing. Competing publications may have their own writers, but several fall under the umbrella of a shared holding company. The push for more advertisers to make up for falling subscriptions has lead to friendlier writing, which means less scathing reviews and gentler words for shitty cars.

For proof, read what happened to Steve Burgess of The Detroit News (he was later rehired and given an apology).

The colorful, user-friendly internet as we know it is still a teenager, a product of the early 90s. The interactive and social “Web 2.0” revision is even younger. Perhaps online publishers need time to mature. In the meantime, I’ll continue paying to receive paper in the mail.