Paul testing a camel for miles per gulp of water.

What a long, strange trip it’s been!

It’s almost precisely 30 years since I first wrote about the auto industry as the classic “cub” reporter, here in Detroit. Back then, Chrysler was in a desperate struggle for survival and with oil prices skyrocketing, the Big Three were collectively feeling the heat of the emerging Japanese auto industry.

For the automakers, it was the worst of times ; for auto writers, like myself, it was the best of times, for there was endless demand for coverage of the industry’s crisis.

The more things change, it’s said, and the more they stay the same. Three decades later, Chrysler is again struggling for its survival, as is General Motors and, to only a slightly lesser degree, Ford. Skyrocketing oil prices devastated Detroit’s once-profitable light truck line-up, and gave the imports – now including the Koreans and possibly soon, the Chinese – another grand opportunity.

This time round, there are a variety of additional complications, notably the meltdown on Wall Street, the sub prime fiasco and the consequent credit crunch. But once again, there’s an incredible appetite for news from Detroit and the other automotive capitals of the world.
If one thing has truly changed, over the past three decades, it’s the way that news is delivered. Far more rapidly than the auto industry, the media have been evolving from a push to a pull system. When I started out, there were a relative handful of reliable news sources in the traditional print and broadcast realms. Today, while some of the old-line outlets are fading or gone entirely, the total list of automotive outlets has actually skyrocketed, and rather than waiting for a scheduled broadcast or the arrival of the mailman or delivery boy, readers simply need open a web browser to access most of those news sources.

I was lucky enough to stumble into the online world in its infancy, and as many of you know, ran a major website for close to a dozen years. To answer a question posed repeatedly during the Detroit Auto Show press days, I sold that site in late 2007, and moved on entirely, nearly a year later. I wish the new owners and editors well, but see an opportunity to return to the Web with an entirely new magazine, in rough form an Internet extension of the automotive news bureau I have long operated.

So, what is TheDetroitBureau.com? It’s an amalgam of some of the automotive world’s best and brightest writers, reviewers and commentators, folks like Joe Szczesny, who has been covering the business even longer than I have, as well as writer Mike Strong, analyst Charlie Vogelheim, European-based contributor Henny Hemmes, “green” columnist John DeCicco and spy photographer extraordinare Brenda Priddy. Stay tuned as others join the group.

Collectively, we’d like to think of ourselves as the Voice of the Automotive World. Yes, that’s presumptuous, in large part, because we can only achieve that goal by encouraging you, our reader, to share the space on these digital pages. We want to hear from you, whether you’re a top industry executive, a “grunt” on the line, or simply a car buyer with something to say about the latest products. Send us your stories, hammer on us with your criticism  and, we hope, some compliments, too. E-mail us your pictures and as we upgrade our site, we’ll look for your video as well.

We hope you like what you see and give us time, we’ll try to reflect the input of our readers; it’s one of the great benefits of publishing on the Internet. Spread the word and come back to visit us at TheDetroitBureau.com, the Voice of the Automotive World.