2017 Azbee Awards of Excellence
Category
Print > Government Coverage > Heartland
Awarded to
Ryan Beene, Staff Reporter; Krishnan Anantharaman, News Editor
Entry details
Autos and Washington
Issue date (if applicable):
Publication name: Automotive News
Publishing company: Crain Communications Inc.
Website home page: autonews.com
Please describe the publication's mission and readership:
Automotive News serves automakers, suppliers and dealers. Our 57,000 paid subscribers are split roughly into thirds: dealers; automakers and suppliers; and others. Our mission is to be the primary source of industry news, data and insight for the industry’s decision makers. We provide our audience the information they need, in a timely manner and in the format that they desire. Automotive News (in weekly tabloid print, digital and e-newsletter formats), autonews.com, related magazines, our daily webcasts -- First Shift in the a.m. and AutoNews Now in the p.m. -- and our specialized e-newsletters are part of Crain Communications. Our website has 340,000 registered users and averages 2.2 million visits a month, with 1.3 million unique visitors. The vast majority of our articles are staff written. Our coverage includes regular monthly pages/departments: Production Line, Connected Car, Marketing, Finance & Insurance, Fixed Operations, and Remarketing. The first is devoted to supplier/technology news; the last three to key dealership profit centers. Industry executives pay up to $1,500 to attend our annual events, proof that they see value in those events. These include (with 2017 attendance): Automotive News World Congress (1,100+), L.A. and N.Y. marketing seminars (800+; 500+); Best Dealerships To Work For seminars and dinner (400), and PACE awards for supplier innovation (450).
Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:
These articles prove that getting into the weeds a little bit on policy can yield compelling stories.
The Tesla story reflects the depth of Washington reporter Ryan Beene’s understanding of NHTSA, accrued by covering the agency so closely for so long. Also, rather than being a Tesla story, it’s an autonomous driving technology story that’s instructive for the industry. The same applies to the MPG debate story. The mid-term evaluation is arguably the biggest auto regulatory story of 2016. This piece sketched the landscape ahead.
The blindsided story was based on a tip that Detroit and German automakers were up in arms about a quiet rule change by NHTSA that would more than double the cost of missing Corporate Average Fuel Economy targets. The change in penalties for noncompliance wasn’t widely known or understood, because it was not part of the normal CAFE rulemaking but related to another regulation about indexing of fines to inflation. To get the story, Beene rooted out details from an innocuous-sounding note buried deep in the Federal Register.
Since the government imposed CAFE targets in response to the Arab oil embargo, some luxury automakers have chosen to pay the fines rather than boost efficiency. Thus, a fine increase has the potential to upend the economics of fuel economy strategy and compliance across the industry, particularly for historic fine-payers Mercedes and Jaguar-Land Rover.
This was both a factual and conceptual scoop: we were first to report the news and explain what it meant.
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Autos and Washington
Category
Print > Government Coverage > Heartland
Description
Publication name:
Automotive News
Company:
Crain Communications Inc.
Winner Status
- National Silver Award
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