By: Charles Bowen Many Areas Of the Newsroom May Need This Car Resource
The automobile is an American icon. We measure out our lives by memories of what cars our families owned at key moments in our histories. We celebrate cars in song and pictures. We make toys of them for our children. We've changed our entire economy to accommodate an ever-more mobile society with everything from fast food to drive-up banking.
Cars even have become a huge part of our language over the past century. Doubt that? Consider that these days we all know how to kick the tires, check under the hood, hop in the driver's seat, get it in gear, put the top down, and step on the gas. Our Civil War ancestors would have recognized every one of the words in that sentence, and yet would not have had a clue of what we were talking about.
So it's not just automobile writers who need quick access to information about cars, past and future. Fast facts about cars can help reporters and editors throughout your newsroom, regardless of their specialties. For instance:
o Your police reporter is working on a story about car thefts and discovers that certain vehicles are more popular among local criminals than other specific rides. Where can she go to see how this data compares with national figures and those in other cities?
o The consumer staff wants to do a story on recalled products. Where can the reporters find the latest information on recalled cars and the details of their problems?
o A business writer wants to top an economic story with an example of resale values on key products. Where can she quickly learn the going price of, say, a 1996 Chrysler New Yorker?
o Your features editor has an idea for a story on popular colors for new cars. Where can he determine what's hot and what's not?
Increasingly for stories like these, many journalists are discovering cars.com. This 4-year-old Chicago-based commercial Web site (which is jointly owned by some of the nation's largest newspaper companies) covers a wide range of auto information. While its primary function is to facilitate the buying and selling of new and used cars online, it also has a huge arsenal of free research tools. Among them are local and national inventories of new and pre-owned vehicles, automotive reviews from newspapers and magazines around the country, model reports, advice and dealer locators, and services for researching financing options.
To use the resource, visit the site at http://www.cars.com, where a busy introductory page is topped with tabs that can be clicked to reach its major subsections, including Find a Car, Sell Your Car, Prices & Research, Car Reviews, Care & Repair, and Finance & Insurance. Other subsections are directly accessible through hyperlinks listed on the left column, under topics such as Deals, Car Talk, and Advice.
All these work fine for the casual Web surfers, but writers and editors on deadline probably want to cruise into the fast lane. To do that, scroll to the bottom of the introductory page to click on the Index link. This produces a comprehensive site map with hyperlinks to every major section, including buying guides and tools, reviews and advice columns.
Other considerations for using cars.com in your work:
o Need translations of automotive terms? The Glossary, linked from the Advice section in the introductory screen's left column, can help you sort out the language of carmakers and dealers.
o For feature ideas, don't miss the Best & Worst section, also linked from the left column. A resulting screen provides links to topics such as lists of top sellers, survey results, indexes on most stolen cars and most popular colors, results of road tests and fuel-economy studies.
o For more investigative tools, click the Prices & Research tab at the top of the site's main page. From the next page, you can search for car values as reported in the famed "Black Book" used by professional used car dealers, as well as find links to car reviews, profiles and buyer guides.
---
Bowen writes columns, articles and books from West Virginia, and is host of the daily Internet News syndicated radio show (http://www.netnewstoday.com).
charlesbowen@compuserve.com
Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here