Close Contests I’m Following: 1) Cruze vs. Jetta: GM’s long-term survival hinges on Chevrolet, by far its biggest brand. The Chevrolet Cruze compact (which is really a Daewoo built in Ohio) is off to a strong start, helped by the earthquake that crippled its Toyota and Honda competition. But Chevy is now threatened from a new direction: VW, which is trying to gobble market share by building cheap anodyne anycars in factories with low labor costs. The Jetta (built in Mexico) and the larger Passat (built in a new nonunion plant in Tennessee) are daggers aimed at the heart of GM and, more significantly, the UAW. This month, Cruze sales fell (compared with last month). It held on to the bestseller position–but Jetta sales are up, it’s now #3 and is closing in fast. Exciting! If Obama really is a corporatist he’ll find some way to hobble VW. …
2: Slate vs. Tina: Slate‘s just-unveiled redesign is a huge improvement over the tragic, overly curated 2008 redo that put blogs in a second-class ghetto and caused traffic to plateau. Judging from Quantcast, it appears to be working–with Slate leaving Tina Brown’s slumping Daily Beast in the dust. It would be wrong, very, very wrong, to generalize from early data. Should current trends persist, however, there will be gloating. …
10/12 Update: The trends are persisting. … Tina Brown’s well-publicized, big-payroll site is now in danger of being caught and passed by The Daily Caller. … The potential gloating, should that occur, might constitute an environmental hazard under forthcoming EPA regs. …
Disclosure: Tina’s people would want a conflict-of-interest disclosure. Here’s the boilerplate:
Conflict of interest disclosure–Possible reasons I might have it in for Newsweek/Daily Beast include: 1) This blog once was at Newsweek. Tina didn’t want it; 2) Their first print issue was crap, and not holdover crap but corrupting new suck-up-to-Hillary-with-unreadable-cover-story-so-she’ll-come-to-your-BS-conference crap; 3) They are pursuing an outmoded big bucks/big hype model of journalism that rightfully doesn’t work so well any more, partly because it depends on fawning publicity-givers and sheep-like readers to overlook things like point (2); 4) They suck up to Hollywood studios and chase celebrity bylines; 5) The Beast site exudes a soul-deadening desperation in the pursuit of faux fun and engineered “buzz;” 6) It has a subtle, insidious liberal bias that is far more annoying than HuffPo‘s former straightforward liberal bias; 7) The Beast‘s little news summaries read like they are written by 21 year old interns who don’t know what they are writing about (see, e.g., the Beast‘s obit blurb for Warren Christopher, which says, among other things, that ”Christopher served as the overseer for the Florida election recount in 2000 before the Supreme Court stepped in and took over control.” Huh?) 8 )They are a slow-moving, profusely bleeding target and attacking them is fun. … Also 9) I used to write for Slate, which inclines me favorably toward them. But my blog was one of the ones consigned to the second-class ghetto in 2008, which inclines me unfavorably. It’s not a wash! …