Reviews & Muses

For about a decade, I have been writing content for The News Wheel, an automotive news website owned by my company. It's shutting down in two months, and hundreds of my articles will go to the void.

My company provides logistic and marketing solutions for dealerships, and part of the marketing packages it used to sell to dealers included TNW articles that link back to their own websites.

For the better part of 10 years, my team wrote monthly content — typically about current car news — plugging 1-2 relevant links that sent readers to the dealerships. We generally kept the content related to the brands sold at those dealers (I focused mainly on Toyota and Honda) but there was flexibility, enabling us to also write evergreen content and, in my case, about Formula 1, which I greatly enjoyed.

Though TNW posts were included in our premium marketing packages, for many years we still wrote them for dealerships that only had the standard package. It was technically a free bonus for them, but we wanted to grow the website, and that required content.

It worked. Prior to COVID, we wrote over 100 pages for TNW every month. I personally wrote about 30 on average. The website was steadily gaining in readership, at one point earning about 600-700k clicks per month. It felt like the million was coming.

It never did. We had no shortage of creatives capable of producing well-written and entertaining content, but TNW's greatest weaknesses, in my opinion, were its presentation and navigation. Over the years, some minor suggestions of mine were implemented, but adequately addressing the more fundamental issues would have required a level of investment the company was not prepared to make.

In the early days, we cared enough to pay for a user feedback service. It had a silly name I can't remember. Anonymous users would be invited to record themselves browsing our website, talking through their actions out loud. This was intended to help us identify user experience issues.

I think it makes a lot of sense to care about UX, so it was always strange to me that when we reviewed these surveys as a team, the common group reaction was to laugh at the often-confused readers. Instead of taking their feedback seriously, we dismissed them as being clueless internet users and changed nothing. I was concerned about this and expressed it to my supervisor at the time; not long after, we simply stopped using the process altogether.

I could say the company didn't want to continue paying for it, but realistically, the larger issue was that there wasn't much to do but laugh at the befuddled users. We didn't actually have the means to implement meaningful changes, so there was little use in discovering common user pain points in the first place.

Indeed, to the many suggestions I made over the years, the most typical response was that they were not technically feasible due to back-end limitations. We didn't have the tools for improving website navigation, and the company was never going to give us those tools. That would have taken money. The obvious futility of trying to make the site better ultimately fostered a culture of apathy.

Then, we stopped writing TNW posts for the non-premium packages. We'd lost team members over the years, they hadn't been replaced, and job responsibilities were shifting around. We no longer had the overhead to write extra content, and TNW wasn't being prioritized. To make matters worse, COVID majorly disrupted the auto industry, and many dealerships chose to cancel services. We didn't have many premium customers. I went from writing 30 pages for the site every month to writing about three. Some writers on the team no longer wrote for the site at all. TNW had been stagnating at this point, but this was a killing blow.

The bulk of the readership quickly went away and what little is left has been on a steady decline. TNW currently gets about 50k clicks per month, mainly from old posts still rating well on Google, and it's not getting any better — despite a vague, almost ceremonial requirement that everyone on the team write two bylines for it each month. About a year ago, some higher ups, who didn't even know about TNW for some reason, realized it existed and came to us asking for ideas about how to squeeze all the advertising potential out of it before they discontinued it. I suggested the best way to maximize the ads would be to invest in the site enough to grow the readership again, exposing more people to the ads, but that type of long-term planning is anathema to our corporate overlords, particularly in the marketing sector.

As it stands, my company will stop paying for the site in December, after which about a decade's worth of content will vanish. I don't know exactly how many articles I've written for TNW , but it's easily in the thousands. Most of them are inconsequential, but I'm proud of a good number of them, as well as of the content written by my coworkers. I'm sad that the only thing left of all that work will be whatever we back up on our personal devices.