You Talk, We Listen: Explaining Your Role in Hagerty’s Story Selection
This story first appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.
I owe some of you thanks for doing my job and choosing this issue’s cover. We pitched this benefit to HDC members during the first-ever Hagerty Drivers Club Days in June. They chose from three options. It leads to a question I get all the time: How do we decide what goes in the mag? Oh boy, how much time do you have?
A car magazine is like a cocktail in that it has a consistent base ingredient—cars—mixed with dashes of people, destinations, parts, and advice. HDC members prefer American cars, so we do, too. We believe that what you spend your hard-earned money on is a good proxy for your interests. That said, we also believe it’s our job to present your interests in fresh ways and with new information.
Click on this link to see what I mean. There’s a Mustang, the car owned by nearly 100,000 of you, paired with a Lamborghini Miura. What the? Odd, but read on and you’ll see they have plenty in common. I love how much I learned, all written in the pearly prose of ninja scribe Aaron Robinson.
We constantly test to learn what resonates. For instance, I asked in this space if you’d like to follow my hellish restoration of a Ferrari 308 GT4. I received a flood of letters in the affirmative. My latest update is here.
And we’re not afraid to rip up the recipe. See our story on the 1992 McLaren F1 and its new successor, the GMA T.50, here. We tend to avoid cars that are worth as much as a dreamy retirement portfolio, but we thought you’d appreciate this exception. The F1 is one of the best driver’s cars ever made, and we admire creator Gordon Murray’s gumption in attempting a sequel. Read it, then head to our YouTube channel, where you can hear the two cars.
Now back to the covers. We suspected that the F1/T.50 might not appeal to most but included an option with them to gauge interest. The other two were safe bets—a cover with a flathead V-8 and another with the Mustang and Miura. In this case, our assumptions proved spot-on. The supercars were a distant third, the others neck and neck. The flathead won by a slim margin. For those who voted, thank you. Please keep the feedback coming.
Don’t read too much into the cover. You are not on news stands so content matters.
These come out of the postal box and are opened yo see what is in side.
Now if you were on newsstands you would need a Mustang, Camaro, street rod or vintage Corvette in red. There you need to attract attention.
Well it all depends on where you are at. I’ve found Thriftbooks to be an excellent supplier of novels that I never got around to reading at a bushel a basket. On the cheap, but the words are as good as the day they were written. They also have a variety out of print hardcovers in excellent condition if you’re so inclined.So when the Sep/Oct of ‘Drivers Club’ showed up as did roughly the same time as ‘ Sometimes a Great Notion’ and … Hagerty got the quick breeze through. There it now sits now, no offence . A friend once said – “I really don’t like long novels.I like quick reads.” – I said – “They call those magazines.” So as fat as input, many readers say ‘buy/drive what you love’ , I suggest doing the same as for publishing articles. I’ll read about Hupmobiles even though I know nothing of them rather than the same old same old. But then again that’s just me.
(ps) as far as this online format goes you might want to perhaps or at last mention/ update the condition of ‘Fast Jack’ Beckman considering how many american muscle car owners watch this page instead of reviewing the current state of Nascars lawsuit again. Some of us still watch NHRA.
You may not be competing for newsstand eyeball-attention, Larry, but to me, the cover matters. It matters because, like the content and photos within, like the sheen and feel of the paper, like the size and heft, it expresses the overall quality of the magazine at first glance. When I open my mailbox delivered copy, I dawdle a bit over the superb photography on the cover (knowing there will be more inside) and digest a bit of the cover text in anticipation of some of the articles. The quality of the cover conveys the quality of the entire publication, and as such should get proper consideration by you and your staff in assembling your fine magazine!
Agree! And I’m much quicker to look through the magazine when the cover is a flathead V8 rather than a modern supercar. But in either case, I still will look through each copy.