2020 Azbee Awards of Excellence

Category

Overall Excellence > Magazine of the Year > More Than $3 Million Revenue

Awarded to

Automotive News staff; Keith Crain, Editor in Chief

Entry details

Automotive News

Issue or publication date: Oct. 7, 2019; Oct. 14, 2019; Oct. 21, 2019
Publication name: Automotive News
Publishing company: Crain Communications Inc.
Website home page: autonews.com

Please describe the publication's mission and readership:

The 56,810 paid subscribers of Automotive News are split roughly into thirds: automakers, their parts suppliers and franchised dealers. Our mission is to be the primary source of news, data and insight for the industry’s decision makers. We provide our audience the accurate information they need, in a timely manner and in the format that they desire. Automotive News (in weekly tabloid print and digital formats); specialty magazines Shift on mobility trends and Fixed Ops Journal about the automotive service business; autonews.com and its daily e-newsletter; twice-daily newscasts -- First Shift and AutoNews Now -- and our specialized e-newsletters are all part of Crain Communications. Our website has 181,506 registered users and averages 2.79 million visits a month, with 1.76 million monthly unique visitors and a monthly average of 6.5 million page views. The vast majority of our articles are staff written. Industry executives pay up to $1,500 to attend our events, proof that they see value in them. These include (with 2019 attendance): Automotive News World Congress (1,100+); sold-out Leading Women regional (350) and Detroit (650) conferences; L.A. marketing seminar (500+); Retail Forum NADA (sold out at 450); 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:

The centerpiece of our entry is the Retail Realities special report in the Oct. 14 issue. We dispatched a half-dozen reporters and editors across the country to get 20 pages of fly-on-the-wall stories about how auto dealerships handle thorny issues including succession, recruitment and retention, the shift to digital retail and relationships with automakers. While that project consumed substantial resources, we continued to cover important stories, such as the longest nationwide UAW strike against GM in almost half a century. Please don’t miss the enterprising story on page 58-60 of that Oct. 14 issue about the overnight shift on the picket lines in Flint, which first appeared on autonews.com.
We devote a lot of coverage to electric vehicles, as is particularly evident in the Oct. 7 and Oct. 21 issues, even though they make up a small slice of the market. We do this because automakers are investing tens of billions in these cleaner, fuel-saving technologies, but how they can be made and sold profitably is not yet clear. Our mission is to document the strategies, the challenges, the policies and the profits to help readers navigate the changing business landscape, whether they work at automakers, parts companies, dealerships or elsewhere in value chain.
We provide high-quality coverage every week, including an editorial page with original cartoons and the playful Final Assembly page. We have regular departments about vehicle news, retail technology, dealership best practices, economic-development trends, supply-chain developments, finance & insurance, automotive service and mobility.

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Entry URL(s), if applicable:

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