How Starting Jalopnik Led to a Career in Automotive & Motorsport Media with Mike Spinelli | FanAmp Fast Lane

Mike's start in motorsports

‍#1. Give us an overview of your career covering cars.

I started Jalopnik, the site which is kind of off the radar right now. It just really kind of sucks because it lasted as an independent voice in automotive media for a number of years. And then it was bought and sold a few times as a Gawker property back in the day. I was one of the co-founders of The Drive, a YouTube channel back in 2011, 2012, with my friends and the guys from TangentVector who are now an independent video production studio for automotive and motorsports. And I've been working with those guys on and off for about 17 years. So I've done a bunch of both documentary-style stuff and docuseries with them, both for commercial clients and stuff that we've done on our own.

Most recently, I was the head of content for Motorsport Network and left there recently. And one thing I forgot is, I was also editor in chief of 0-60 magazine back in the day. So yeah, it's kind of been a fun 21 years of sort of being around the thing. A lot of stuff has happened and a lot of stuff I probably forgot. 

Greg: For Jalopnik, you were on the founding team of that or you started there?

So yeah, Jalopnik, I started that site for Gawker Media. So back when Gawker was just the website Gawker and a few other websites like Gizmodo, they were looking to branch out into different areas. And, you know, one of the things they did was gaming and then Jalopnik was a site that was the Gawker version of what an automotive site was going to be. I was the founding editor and grew it over the next few years.

#2. Were you into cars before all of this? Before launching Jalopnik? Why were you excited about it?

I was always into cars from when I was a kid. But I wasn't like everybody else, who, it seems, is an absolute car fanatic. And I kind of had taken some time off from the car world. Like I was really into cars in high school. When I was in high school in suburban New York, I mean, it was really all about muscle cars like the sport compact thing was only starting to percolate. There was a little bit of a European tuner car scene and a lot of that was just kind of rich guys with really sort of interesting gray market cars that were bringing over like, you know, BMW 330, 323i or something with the small Euro bumpers. But other than that, it was muscle cars. And that's because that was the cheapest thing to do. And so we were sort of drag racing and doing that stuff in high school.

And then I got into music. And I stopped doing that. And the first part of my career I was doing some internships in the music business. I was playing in a band. And then I kind of got into journalism school and went to a sort of a traditional journalism route until I got out of school, and there weren't really any jobs. So I was like, I don't know, I was looking for something else. And I landed at a company called Jupiter Communications, and then Jupiter Research. It was a research firm, tracking the early days of the commercial internet. And I just got really into the functioning and the culture around internet startups and that whole world. And so I was aware of Gawker. It got to the point where I was thinking, well, do I do this with music or do I go back further and do it with cars? 

Yeah, I was always into cars. I got much more into cars after starting Jalopnik though. I had always followed the industry and I knew whenever something cool came out but I didn't really get into the industry stuff until Jalopnik.

#3. What was the first step to building a new media company?

Well, it's funny because that's what I would ask. And you asked that because we're sort of thinking about that now, about building media brands. But to Nick Denton, the brand was nothing. It was all about what was on the page and that was really the thing. It was like the name could have been anything or at least it needed to be within a certain framework.

For me, I was really thinking about the brand. And every time I would say the ‘B word’ to Nick, he'd be like, don't think about the brand, think about what's on the page. And so that's how I thought about it, the brand was the voice.

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Mike's current role

#4. When does 'writer and producer' mean to you? What does your career entail?

A writer is a storyteller, right? So when I write about a new car model, I like to write about the car in context of where it fits in the market, where it fits in enthusiasts' heads. The storytelling in automotive, let's say, and this is sort of separate from motorsports because motorsports is much more of a sport, obviously. But a writer just tells stories about the thing, right? So that could be for any medium, right?

Right now, there aren't a lot of jobs for traditional writers. Like when I think about my career now, writing is a necessity more than it's the final product. It's part of the R&D for the thing that ends up on either YouTube or hopefully streaming, like if we keep doing the kinds of full length things that we're doing with motorsports.

Greg: Are you saying the medium has shifted from the end product being written word to video or audio?

That's exactly it. The end writing is the constant, but the end product changes depending on what the medium of choice is. So for Jalopnik, the writing was very different from writing for a magazine. But you're still telling a story in a smaller space and it's a tighter story. And whether it's in print, it's on video or whether it's a Sora prompt, it always starts with writing and I think that's the thing that has pulled me through these different changes that happen in the nature of the media.

Greg: And what about the producer side?

I mean, it's really interesting when you think about how producing means something slightly different in almost every medium. I think when it comes to producing, the producer is the person that has to make the thing happen, like all of the details that go into the production. It's similar, but it's all the things that a writer doesn't have to think about while they're writing.

#5. What are three qualities that have helped you succeed as both a writer and producer?

Curiosity

Curiosity is absolutely the first one because without it you're done. It sounds stupid, but when I see something and I want to know more about it, that's work for me. Everything lights up when that happens.

Work Ethic and Maximizing Skills

The second thing is the—there's a lunch pail aspect to doing this that is no different than showing up at a job site and pulling out your tools and going to work. Because writing is just plumbing. You know what I mean? You're just a plumber. Except that instead of water, you are trying to get a point across. It sounds stupid. But it's a skill and it's not glamorous, right? I mean, it's this word in front of that one in front of that one. And those words have to mean getting to the thing. It's just like routing the pipes in through your house.

Confidence

I think the third thing is getting over it. I'm more comfortable now, but I've never been super comfortable putting myself into uncomfortable positions. And that's the thing is that as a producer or as somebody who needs to get their job done, this might sound silly but my grandfather had this thing where he said, the five minutes of embarrassment is a lifetime of health or a lifetime of something… I don’t know, but it’s that you have to let go of any kind of misgivings that you might have. You just have to put yourself in those uncomfortable positions and get through it. And I guess that's, that's a life skill, right? 

#6. What have been the most rewarding and the most challenging aspects of your work?

Rewarding

The most rewarding thing for me is the next thing. A lot of people who write or do anything, when it's done, they only see the things that they didn't get to do. Sometimes I read the thing that got published, and it felt good in the moment. And then I read it later. And I go, ‘God, this sucks. You're a terrible writer.’  You have to kind of tell that voice to shut up while you're working and then let it happen later.

Challenging

The challenge is what's my next idea? And I always feel like I have to start from scratch again. And I don't know whether everybody feels this way. And probably some do. But the hardest part is feeling like you have to start over again all the time. Whether it's with a new medium, whether it's learning a new thing or meeting a new head of PR for a company or there's a new car out and you're trying to stay relevant in the thing is the challenge. The reward is the project is done and you get to see it, right?

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Mike's advice

#7. If you could go back and give advice to your younger self, what would it be?

I kind of stumbled into the thing. And you know, whether it was the right decision at the time or the wrong decision at the time, it always sort of works out. I mean, this is the cop out to that question is that I can say like, don't worry, it'll work out. That's part of it is don't worry, it'll work out. And the other one is to invest in Amazon!

I think I would tell myself to just become more resilient than you are right now. The quicker you can get out of the hole and get back to the thing where you are moving forward again, the better. So if I could tell myself, cut the shit a little bit and get back into it and stop feeling sorry for yourself in those times, maybe I could have saved a little time. Maybe I could have had time to do one more thing that either turned out well or bad.

#8. What about advice to someone who wants to be in this field?

My best advice would be to learn to do a thing. And then later also learn how to write about it. If you want to be an influencer, have an audience, go become a tech at a BMW shop, and then do improv at night. There are new skills that we didn't have to learn back then that I feel like we're sort of leaning more toward doing things and not just talking about them. If I could have done something differently, I might have taken a couple of years off to become an assistant at a Ferrari shop.

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Mike's career highlights

#9. You've obviously written a lot. You've been close to video production on many interesting projects. Where do you see this space going in the next few years? How do you see it evolving?

I feel like the time you spend on the couch watching YouTube is different from the time you spend going through your phone on the bus or whatever. I think longer form storytelling is going to—you're going to see a lot more volume of it. I mean, there've been a lot of studies about people, especially younger people, spending less time in social media situations. I don't know where TikTok is going to end up in a few years. We've sort of gotten to the point where everything is a battle. Everything's in the arena. Like if we're not arguing over something, it's not content. And I think that's causing some fatigue. And so I think there's going to be a lot more opportunity for doing longer form things. But at the same time, I think YouTube is still the future of media. 

Coming down to what people are going to be looking at as they're scrolling through their feeds? I don't know. I mean, feed based content is going to start to suffer from over saturation or just overabundance. And I don't think that the algorithms are going to be able to keep up with the discovery that it's going to take to keep everybody's attention span as they start to hit the ceiling of attention.

#10. If you could create your dream piece of content—it's written, it's video, anything—what would that be?

I think F1: The Movie is kind of an interesting way to do it. If you're a real racing fan, there are a million things wrong with it. But if you watch it on a good IMAX screen, it brings up an interesting tension, right, and the tension between a mass audience and the needs of a mass audience and the needs of an endemic audience. So I would love to see something like that produced for the endemic audience. Something like Rush, I think, was a good movie, it feels more immersive into a time and place that we're not, we can't get to anymore. Whereas F1: The Movie sort of feels like a modern maverick kind of experience. But if you could shift that to make a full immersion film for real racing fans, I mean, I would love to do that.

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