“How are we ever going to fit all of this into the magazine?!” That was the dilemma our company faced 25 years ago as we assembled the first Grassroots Motorsports of the new millennium–a magazine that still had the exact same mission it’d had all along: Cover the whole world of playing with sports cars.
In the ’80s, this was relatively easy, and we covered a roughly 30-year band of cars starting with Austin-Healeys and Triumphs and progressing through Datsuns and RX-7s, all the way to modern GTIs and BMWs. As new cars came out, we covered them–first as new cars, then used cars, then abused cars.
I’d argue that 2001’s release of “The Fast and the Furious” marked a breaking point. Tuner culture had broken into the mainstream, and our magazine was now trying to cover 50 years of car culture. Even as a 10-year-old kid, I would get whiplash reading copies of Grassroots Motorsports: twin-cam Hondas and back to SU carburetors.
Worse than a lack of focus, though, was a lack of time, space and resources. Trying to fit in everything meant it was impossible to dive deep, chase stories to their logical ends, or really embed ourselves in any specific audience or culture.
Which is where Classic Motorsports came in. Split the magazine in two, the reasoning went, and we’d have the space, focus and budget to write better stories, each aimed more precisely at their markets. I’m pleased to say that the gamble worked, and we now publish two thriving magazines, each aimed at a different (but complementary) niche, and neither trying to be all things to all people.
Why am I telling this story now? No, it’s not to juice sales of our sister title–it’s to talk about our next two. Because, to be completely honest, we’ve sort of found ourselves right back where we were 25 years ago.
This time, though, it isn’t the number of cars on the market; it’s the number of cars in our shop and the number of hands touching them. We’ve now got a team of car nuts that are building more cars, going to more events, turning more laps and finding more stories than we can fit into the magazine. And I’m definitely part of the problem, considering you haven’t yet read about even half of the cars I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s the same issue over on the Classic Motorsports side of the building.
The world has changed since 2003, though, so we’re not starting two more magazines to absorb all this content, nor are we going to lock it all behind the online paywall of GRM+. Instead, we’re finally going to treat our YouTube channels like their own publications, with additional time, space, budget and stories independent of our magazines.
While we’ve been posting videos for years, they’ve almost always been afterthoughts, captured on the margins while we worked on written content. Now, our YouTube channel is free to find stories it wants to tell.
What’s that actually look like? For starters, it means more project cars–and more time in the shop watching us build them. We can show a full magazine story’s worth of build progress in about a minute of video, which means a 20-minute YouTube video lets us dive way deeper than we otherwise could.
It also means more track tests and feature cars, as we’re invited to drive so many cool cars each year but only have room for about 16 print features annually.
It also means stories you wouldn’t normally see, since the written word just can’t communicate everything. I spent last week shooting factory tours, for example, and have no idea how I’d fit a 4-hour tour through seven different buildings into a few pages and four photos, or even into a 25-image gallery on the website. It should be a cool video.
It also means we should reach a new audience. It’s no secret that our company and our industry needs a steady stream of new drivers to join the party, and we think YouTube is full of people we’d love to see alongside us in the paddock.
If all this goes according to plan, our videos will become an independent but complementary publication that glues the ecosystem together and lets us tell more stories to more people–just like our second magazine.
Which is where you come in: The Grassroots Motorsports channel is currently sitting at 38,000 subscribers, but we think we need 100,000 to please the almighty algorithm.
If everyone reading this column subscribed today, we’d hit our goal tomorrow. While I hate to ask you to put your magazine down, it would mean the world to me and my team if you went to YouTube and subscribed to our channel. It’s free and should take less than a minute–and I can’t wait to see where the next 25 years takes us.
Comments
Thanks for the reminder, despite spending a lot of time on this forum, the YT channel is not in my algorithm.
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