On Monday I had a nice chat with Perry Stern, MSN Auto’s Editor. Perry has been there since it started in 1995 (it was called CarPoint back then) and has been running the show since 2002. As Perry says, it was “the first Microsoft product not to come in a box.” Our conversation was supposed to center on fuel efficient vehicles, gas prices, etc., but I figured you guys are sick of hearing about that stuff, and anyway, I was curious about his site. Continue reading...
Their audience, as you might expect, is very general. The most popular car on MSN Autos is the Honda Accord (in contrast, the most searched for car on CarDomain is the Chevy Caprice). They have five full-time writers and six or seven regular freelancers who crank out four to five stories and/or reviews per week. So far they have only dabbled in the whole blog thing.
MSN Autos generally gets two test cars per week. I asked Perry what cars he’d been impressed with recently, and he said the GMC Yukon Hybrid (which we got to check out a few weeks back ) and the Honda Civic EX. In addition to the reviews, they do a lot of auto show coverage. Perry is going off to cover Pebble Beach next month, so maybe I can get him to give us some good photos for the blog. MSN Autos benefits pretty heavily from having their stuff featured on the MSN homepage--when the new Challenger was unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show in February, they got ten million hits in one day.
I’m always curious what other automotive journalists drive for their personal car (plus, I’m always trying to get people to build ride pages on CarDomain). But... Perry doesn’t have a car! (His wife drives a  Ford Explorer.) But then he pretty much always has a test car at his disposal. Must be nice. The pic I used for this blog shows Perry standing next to one of his dream cars, a 911 Turbo.
I asked Perry if he thought now was a good time to buy GM stock, and he said yes. He also said that he had more confidence in GM at the moment than either Ford or Chrysler. He'd also met up with Bob Lutz on Bob's swing through Seattle, and had been impressed with GM's vision for the future.
Perry also asked me a bunch of questions about CarDomain and seemed to think it was a pretty cool site. I'm hoping he'll get a car one of these days and build a ride page.
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