Behind the Wheel” is a series of interviews that will be an ongoing theme with TCF, interviewing not the CEO’s and chief designers of the automotive industry, but rather those who report on them. Previously, I held an interview with SaabKyle04, detailing how he started his career and where it has led him as well as Mr. Regular part 1 & 2. View part 1 & 2 of my interview with Wes Siler of Indefinitely Wild and previous /DRIVE Ride Apart. That’s the theme of these current and future interviews.


Michael Spinelli started his automotive career founding one of the most popular online automotive websites around today, Jalopnik. After serving as the Editor-in-Chief for several years, he transitioned from a digital to print platform at 0-60 Magazine and ultimately found himself back on the Web with /DRIVE. He still misses his 1966 Mustang his sister took to college and never brought back. Although he never revealed it in the interview, he and the car are still searching for their long lost love to this day, yearning to be reunited.

What was your involvement with cars going up as a child? Was your father or someone in your family a gear-head, was it based from a favorite movie, or just a general inclination towards cars in general?

I guess like a lot of boys, I was just hard-wired to love cars. I started memorizing every car on the road pretty early on, and then every other library book was about cars, every toy I wanted was related to cars, I begged my parents to take me to every local car show, etc. Pretty standard stuff. I had an uncle who used to restore Model As and old Cadillacs, but my dad was completely disinterested. But for some reason my parents always drove interesting cars. They had the only Austin Gipsy in the Bronx, which they called “The English Jeep” because they had no idea what it was. Later, my Dad had a ’75 Alfa Romeo Alfetta 1.8 that he loved, but took horrible care of. He had a great mechanic (the late John Mastroianni, Sr. of Auto Turismo Sport). “OIL, Frank,” he used to yell, “CHECK THE OIL!” Mastroianni kept the Alfa running well, mostly, for about eight years, until it just rusted away. It was a shame, really. That was an amazing car. If the early Alfetta had had the build quality of a BMW 320i, it would have been a legend.


What was your first car?

My “first” car was a red 1966 Mustang with a 289 V8 2bbl. It was in awful shape. I bought it when I was 12 from a local butcher for $75 and, to my parents’ horror, had it towed home. It was really rough, but I finally convinced my dad that he and I were going to work on it together. By “work on,” I’m not sure what I was thinking, since my dad had zero knowledge of cars, and I had only a Chilton’s manual and a Craftsman ratchet set. We ended up getting it running, with help from friends. But then my older sister needed a car because she was moving to Vermont, so she got the Mustang. I was broken up, but it would have just sat there for three years until I got my license. I’ve never let her forget it, though. She sold it and bought a lime-green VW Westfalia bus. My first car that I *drove* was a 1973 Buick Century sedan I bought from a very, very old man for $500. He was one of those guys who bought cars with zero options because options were a symptom of anti-Calvinist debauchery that will inevitably destroy America like it did the Romans, or something like that. It had a 350 V8 and it was a manual, but with the shifter on the column. That three-on-the-tree linkage was always jamming, and I used to keep a small mason’s hammer next to my seat, so I could crawl underneath and slam it back to neutral. Eventually I got a transmission guy to do some fancy machining work and put in a Hurst 3-speed shifter. After that, and a few new top-end parts on that small-block V8, and it became quite the Camaro hunter. I worked at a Chevy dealership in high school, so I got to drive every sort of shitbox, and also a lot of cool stuff, like a ’72 Corvette L88 and a Bitter SC, which was a really luxurious, low volume German sedan that looked a little like a 365 GT4 2+2, but was built on the chassis of a European Opel Insignia. The dealership had just one, and I think after a year or two they finally sold it. It cost something like $50,000, and that was back when a C4 Corvette was less than $30k.


You went to school for journalism. I’m guessing by that time, you had a general idea with what you wanted to do in life? Was it to be in an automotive capacity or did that decision come about later?

Well, not exactly. There was a period after high school where I was over cars and I just wanted to move on and do something else. I went toward journalism because I figured I could write pretty well, and it was a skill that might allow me to do other stuff if I wanted — once I figured out what I wanted to do. Truthfully, I had hit a speed bump at trigonometry, so math was out. Most of the rest of my time was spent as a guitar player in a band. Everything was kind of mixed up, and so I just learned to write. After college, I fell into the dot-com world and ended up staying there for five or six years. Then the big crash happened, and I landed at a company doing really boring market research stuff. When the opportunity to start Jalopnik came along, I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself, so I just threw everything into that to try and make it work.


Many “auto-journos” that have Kinja blogs write with very little precision or complexity. They rely more on the car itself than the content of the writing itself. What are your thoughts on those that have a professional background and are in the business compared to amateurs that start from nothing?

Ok, old-fart time. The problem with all the access to writing and publishing online we have now is that the skill has been devalued. Despite all we’ve heard about blogging and “citizen” journalists, writing well isn’t something “anyone can do.” You have to work at it, and be conscious of what makes good and bad writing, and take it seriously. You don’t have to love writing — writing sucks; if you love writing, you probably aren’t that good at it yet — but you do have to be completely involved in it. When I started college, I thought I could write because I got A’s on my high school essays. But in journalism school, I couldn’t believe how much red ink my professors used on my papers. I had to be completely broken down and built back up, and that took time and angst. I hated it. And then, of course, you have to learn reporting and structure and analysis, and all those things. You have to learn your beat — if it’s cars, you have to follow the industry, and absorb everything you can about modern technologies, and production and the business and the engineering and physics and everything. You can’t just start out writing 2000 words on why BMWs are ugly and expect to get a job at Car and Driver. Also, it helps to actually read things. I’ve read articles online where I’d swear the writer hadn’t cracked a single book since graduation. The argument against writing is that “no one reads except Google.” And that may be partly true, but people do pass around interesting ideas and clever articles, so it’s more important than ever to be succinct and compelling and tell a good story. And that’s hard. Mark Twain once said, “If I had more time, I’d have written you a shorter letter.”


How do you feel about the relationships between journalists and automotive companies? With giving an example or two: The Camaro mule crash or Ferrari becoming a little unfriendly with Harris? Or the other way around, such as offering lavish all expense-paid trips to test out the vehicles?

The issue is sort of overblown. A good, fair, sharp journalist can write anything he wants about any car and maintain a decent relationship with the car companies, and still get invited on launch events. Automakers invite some of the best journos to pre-production launches because they know they’re going to get smart observations and criticisms they can use. The trouble is, so many writers confuse being “critical” and “unbiased” with being “smart.” Then again, these days there’s a really wide range of writers attending launch programs. Some are excellent and know more about the industry and about carmaking than the company’s product managers themselves, others are just starting out or write for publications that don’t really do “reviews,” and others are just complete hacks in it for the free trips and shit. I don’t think it’s an existential crisis for car journalists, but in this environment of transparency, they do have to uphold their game. If they don’t it can be embarrassing, if not career-crushing. There are plenty of people on fan forums who know more about a single make of car than any journalist does, and they’re always ready to call out mistakes. But these guys would fall on their faces if they had to cover the whole industry. And there are more opportunities than ever to scrutinize journalists’ work on forums and on social media these days, which can spotlight the hacks and make everyone else think all journos are freeloaders and “in the pocket” of car companies. You can get around all of that by being good at your job.


Although many know of your experiences, give a little timeline of your career. How’d you get up to the point you are now with DRIVE?

After the dot-com crash, I was in a rut and I found out that Gawker wanted to start an automotive blog. I e-mailed them and they asked me to write a few posts. I did and they hired me. That was it. I took a 60% pay cut to do Jalopnik, but I would have done anything to get out of what I was doing, and I thought there might be a future in it. The name was another matter. Gawker’s policy at the time was to name sites in a way that represented a person doing something — Gawker, Defamer, Kotaku, which is Japanese slang for a gamer. For cars, everything we came up with sounded stupid, until we stumbled on “Jalopnik.” I don’t know why we thought that would work, but it did. That was 10 years ago. I ran Jalopnik for a few years, and then got tired of the pace, of having to get every car story first above all else, which was company policy at the time. The pressure to beat the other outlets to the punch was immense. I was worn out. I had gotten a few offers to write for print, and so I left. I did some magazine writing and worked for a video startup called Next New Networks, which is now part of Google. Eventually I got laid off and went to work as editor in chief of a magazine called 0-60, which I’d been writing for, and which I loved. But that only lasted a year, and then the publisher decided Millennials didn’t read car magazines, and closed it up. I went back to Jalopnik for a while, and then was among the first few producers at /DRIVE, and here we are today, still trying to make work. Online video is a brutal business, but it’s been great.


If not writing about cars, what would you write about?

Probably food or music, though I always secretly wanted to be a true-crime writer.


What was one of the worst cars you reviewed? Why? And what was one of your favorites (with this answer, limit it to cars obtainable by the general public)

I was very disappointed when I drove the early Dodge Dart. It was like going back to the ‘80s. It was (and in many ways still is) a car built on a foundation of corporate compromises. A decent, but aging Alfa Romeo chassis that was ruined by engineers tuning it for an American economy-car audience. Horrible steering, bad ride, shifter like a wooden spoon in a quart of yogurt. It was miserable. It made me miss the Neon. It’s a little better now. On the other hand, everything everyone says about the Ford Fiesta ST is true. Most fun for the money of any car I’ve ever driven. Definitely a favorite.


Where do you see automotive media going in 5 years? 10+ years? In a good or bad direction?

I’m a cockeyed optimist. I think automotive media will always find new ways to get people enthusiastic about cars. There are already a million ways for car buyers to get information about new cars, so I’d say the generic “review” will probably fade away, or be subsumed by another medium. Maybe a new Yelp for cars will rise up and the whole review process will be crowdsourced. We’ll see.


What steps would you advise to someone wanting to make a living in journalism, or more specifically, automotive journalism?