La capsula Informativa: frankly… Episode 88: For Journalists, Thought Leadership is the Job
The transcript below is AI-generated and may contain minor inaccuracies. Tune in to the episode audio to hear the full conversation!
Transcript
Dan
Hello and welcome to frankly. Today I am joined by a guest host, Brent Snavely, who’s our VP of Media Relations here at Franco, as well as an awesome guest, Jamie Butters, who is founder of the Butters Bureau, LLC. Jamie talks about his career as an automotive and business journalist that spanned the Detroit Free Press, Bloomberg, Automotive News, and more, and also talks about kind of his shift into the Butters Bureau and what he’s doing now in the ways of thought leadership, plus some discussion of how the auto industry has changed, how automotive journalism has changed, and overall just the importance of relationships in this industry, whether you’re on the communications or the journalism side. So with that, I will turn it over to Jamie. Hey, Jamie, welcome to Frankly. Thanks for coming in.
Jamie
Thanks. Good to be here.
Dan
Yeah.
Brent Snavely
Well, hello, Jamie, and it’s been a little while for me. I’m Brent Snavely with Franco. I’m VP of Media Relations here. So, Jamie, it’s been like 18 years since we started working together. We started back at the, when I joined the Detroit Free Press in March of 2008. But back at that time, you had already been, you were a business editor, auto editor, been pretty established at that point. So just kind of take us through your career arc and what you were doing before that. And And what has happened since then?
Jamie
It was unfortunate we didn’t get to work together longer. There was a lot going on in the world at that time, as we recall. But backing up a little, for me, I grew up in Iowa City, Iowa, college town, and went to school there, but I didn’t graduate from there. Dropped out after working at my college newspaper and radio station. Quit school for a while. Got a job at the Cedar Rapids Gazette as a copy editor and page designer. Realized quickly I needed to finish school. So I started back studying economics. Really wanted to be a business journalist at that point. Felt like I kind of knew the news thing and wanted to have some subject matter expertise. And my girlfriend got a job in Kentucky And I said, I don’t want to move to Kentucky unless we’re going to get married and everything’s going to work out. And she said, okay, bye. But we eventually, she said and changed her mind, invited me down, moved there, worked at the Lexington Herald-Leader in a variety of jobs while I got my degree in finance, trying to learn how to translate the language of CFOs into English for newspaper readers. I worked as a, after I graduated, worked as a business reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader. That was where I wrote my first auto stories. I kind of covered, we called them major industries, see if they were a big employer or had publicly traded stock. That was sort of my beat. So Toyota had their big Georgetown complex nearby, and I went there to cover the Sienna minivan job one ceremony, and it was a pretty painful, challenging effort to write that story. But the Toyota folks were expanding a lot throughout the Southeast, building the new transmission plant in West Virginia and the light truck plant in southern Indiana. So they invited me to come to Tokyo Motor Show. And I didn’t think that was going to be possible, very expensive trip and all that but I was so fortunate. My top editor, Pam Lucky, she and her husband had both been business reporters earlier in their careers. and really thought it was important that they have high quality reporting to cover Toyota and other business, but especially with Toyota and their huge, just transformational presence in central Kentucky. Really felt like it was important to have that coverage. So she found a little money in the budget and sent me to Tokyo and she said, don’t try to cover the auto show. You don’t know what you’re doing. The time zones are all against us. We’ll just run AP like usual, but just go fill up your notebook, learn all you can, and we’ll sort it out when you get back. And I came back and I wrote three stories. I wrote that Fujio Cho, who had been the first major face of the Georgetown plant, was going to be the next president of the company. I wrote about how they were internationalizing. They were going to offer stock in New York and add non-Japanese to the board. which they did the next year. And then I wrote that they had this new kind of car called a hybrid. The 97 show when I was there was when the Prius and the Insight were both just getting launched in Japan. And so I got to try to explain that technology and how Toyota saw it as a stepping stone to pure EVs and hydrogen fuel cells, which was all new technology to me.
Dan
Yeah.
Jamie
Come to 2000, Day after the Bush-Gore election, I packed up with the family and we moved to Detroit. They were, the Detroit Free Press was rebuilding their auto team after the bad strike in the late 90s that stretched into 2000 and started as an auto reporter. And got a great opportunity to go be a Knight-Wallace fellow, take a academic year off to go to the University of Michigan, try to learn what I could, but you don’t really take class. You go to classes, but you’re not getting credit. You’re just learning and meeting people. I got to meet Mike Wallace and stuff like that. We went to Argentina and Turkey and really cool, really cool year.
Dan
That’s awesome.
Jamie
The month before I left, the paper got sold. So the new bosses came in and everyone’s like, are they going to let you go? Is Ganett going to let you go? I’m like, I’m already in it. It’s do they want me to come back? And they did. And so that was the deal. The way it works is they support you when you go and then you have to promise to come back for at least a year. So I did that. I came back. I became the auto editor, added business editor duties after that. But then not too long after you started, maybe half a year or so, we got to work together. And then I went to Bloomberg. And it was a big, big pay jump. And being at a national, international organization and having my finance background, it was something that was kind of a calling for me. It was really interesting because at the Free Press, you’re mostly writing for employees and their families and you definitely could sense that from The news that the company is trying to give you.
Dan
Yeah, it makes sense.
Jamie
But of course at Bloomberg, it’s all about bond holders and stockholders. It’s very financially driven. I was there for eight years, mostly running the auto coverage, sometimes other things. I did some reporting toward the end and some editing as well and some other editing. But then I went to Automotive News, chief content officer and then executive editor, really running that newsroom and on all the platforms, print, online. We launched, we really made the podcast into something big and daily. Seven days a week, podcasting. It was a lot.
Dan
Sounds exhausting, yeah.
Jamie
Last summer, I went to the Wall Street Journal, thought that was gonna be a dream job. Turned out to not be a very good fit. And by this winter, I was on my own. And now I’ve got my own company getting started and It’s been quite a ride.
Dan
Yeah, Well, two things. I guess one, it’s kind of funny. There’s some similarities I hear from talking to you and talking to Brent of like, you’re both business reporters, business journalists who got into auto versus car guys who got into journalism. I think that’s kind of a funny world. I’ve heard both of you now talk about that a little bit of, you know, enjoying the business side of it is what we’re getting in through that door, which is maybe how traditional that is.
Jamie
I mean, it was definitely, that was the case for me. I think for the business writers, it’s often that way. But a lot of the people that you see at the automotive events that are journalists, they’re really enthusiasts. And they’re writing for enthusiasts. And we’ve seen that business really struggle in the last couple of decades. But I don’t know, like I love sports, I love basketball, but I don’t think I want to be a basketball writer. Because I don’t know, maybe those people aren’t as cool in person as they seem on the court, you know?
Dan
Yeah that’s fair. Don’t meet your heroes, right?
Jamie
Plus the hours. Being a business writer, you kind of mostly, mostly work day hours, which is a lot better than cops reporters and politics reporters and sports reporters where you’re always working nights and weekends.
Dan
Yeah, that can be 24 hours. I, you know, before we get into what you’re doing now, you mentioned this a little bit, but you talked about, you’re writing for the consumers or the employees with the Free Press. You’re writing for business with Bloomberg. And then with Automotive News, that’s a whole other kind of group there.
Jamie
Totally. Industry specific and a lot more dealers, but not just dealers. It’s not just a dealer publication at all.
Dan
Yeah, definitely. I mean, the tech side, all of that. But how does that maybe change the way you approach your work as a journalist or as content officer, how did that change how you look at the news?
Jamie
Well, going back to college and fundamentals of communications, right? I have to get the ideas from my head into your head. So I’ve got to 1st try to understand what’s in your head and what do you need to know and how do I need to communicate it to you. So, it was just kind of really getting to know the people in those audiences to kind of learn better how to speak to them. You kind of learn what their jargons are, but you want to still not use that, even if it might work with them. You still want other people to be able to read and understand.
Dan
Yeah, got to be accessible.
Jamie
Yeah. So it was really, I mean, for me, It was such a great experience because I started out covering manufacturing and suppliers and then finance and then retail. So I’ve really gotten to develop a really thorough knowledge of the industry. Most people kind of know the retail side or they kind of know the manufacturing side. And I’ve been fortunate enough to really have a lot of experience in both now.
Dan
Yeah, that’s a great plan and probably serves you well in where you’re headed next.
Jamie
Absolutely.
Dan
So tell us a little bit about that.
Jamie
I mean, it fits really well. So I’ve got, trying to get things started. I might be doing a number of things, but right now it’s, I’ve got a retail-oriented newsletter, helping a client be positioned as a thought leader with me writing columns like I would write for Automotive News. It’s not a salesy thing at all. It’s just providing some free, you know, content and insights for the prospects and customers. I’m doing some public speaking, more on the supplier side, the manufacturing side. And then I’m also trying to launch a new show. So a lot of things going on, a lot of stuff in the works. Maybe a few other things cooking along, but so far, those are the ones. Those are the big ones.
Brent Snavely
And you mentioned Daily Drive at Automotive News, which became and is a big part of Automotive News. Podcasts didn’t exist, 10 plus years ago. So I’m wondering how you think about podcasts and their importance, both in the industry and what you’re doing next, and then the bigger picture thing of how journalism has changed over the years and over your career.
Jamie
Wow, there’s a lot there. Daily Drive was really interesting. You know, we had, when I started, Jason Stein was still the publisher, and he had, sometimes along with Mike Whelan and Mike Martinez, a weekend video show called Weekend Drive, and would usually try to have in-person interviews on camera, you know, with executives. And then COVID hit. We couldn’t go to events. We couldn’t have people come into the office. We didn’t know that people would watch Zoom calls on YouTube, which they apparently do now all the time, or, you know, slightly better than Zoom calls. So Jason started just calling people, recording the calls, and we put them out audio only and really turned it into a podcast. The first few were absolutely fascinating. Jim Farley talking about how they made the decision to shut the factories down. Jose Munoz talking about how he wanted to lean into sales. He was telling Korea, give me all the vehicles you can, we’re going to sell like crazy through this. And It was so vital, right? Because you could really hear these leaders talking through as they’re thinking out loud, right? Over the months, you don’t always, you run out of CEOs.
Dan
Right.
Jamie
And doing it every day became a real burden for Jason. He started asking me and another guy to help out. And I would do some interviews and I was like, how are these done? they’re okay, but do we really want to hear this data analyst for 20 or 30 minutes? Is that really a good use of everybody’s time? So after Jason left, we did him for a while longer, but then we kind of shut it down and retooled with the new format that you still hear today. Open up with top news stories, have a short medium length interview on the back end, and it fits in 20 minutes, which is the average American commute, or dog walk if you’re working from home. So it’s been really successful. We had a Saturday show and a Sunday show. I think to the larger picture of the importance of podcasts, right, it’s hard to quantify in some ways. There are a lot of podcasts out there that don’t necessarily get much traction. Anybody can record something and throw it on the internet and it’s basically a podcast. But, where’s the following? How do you monetize it? All those kinds of challenges. But the ability for basically every citizen to be their own radio station programmer, you know, to pick what goes in their ears, to pick what’s going to play on their phone, what topics, who the voices are, when you want to cut them off and move on to something else, right? It’s just, it’s so powerful. And like, I still listen to a lot of radio. I love public radio and news radio, but a lot of folks are just really prefer to pick what they want to hear and choose it that way. And podcasts are such a really convenient way to let people decide what they want to hear.
Dan
Yeah, I mean, and you know, as you’re talking about that, there’s some pros and cons to that because you can curate the things that you agree with, you can go in one direction or another and really kind of make the decision on what news you consume a little bit more than you probably could before. But I agree, it is a good thing and a good way to be able to, for media to give something that goes a little bit beyond the news also, to kind of like dig into the conversation of it, have a discussion with somebody where you can get maybe stretch out a story a little bit more and get into some details of it.
Jamie
And a big part of it too is the intimacy. because most of us, I mean, sometimes you play it on a speaker, but a lot of times it’s in your AirPods and it’s like no one else hears it. it’s right in your head. You feel this connection with a good show. And so I think there’s a really strong connection there. It’s a really strong medium.
Dan
Yeah.
Brent Snavely
Does it make, you know, I’m wondering, you know, how you’ve seen communication from the industry, the automakers and suppliers change over the years. And kind of in light of the podcast then, how important is it for them, for the sort of the people you talk to be really good storytellers as well, not just the journalists?
Jamie
You know, it is a different skill set. And, you know, back in the day, let’s say twenty years ago, you know, it was really about information, right? It was kind of like trying to squeeze new information out of the person, out of the executive, get them to tell you something they hadn’t told before. And for them, it’s sort of like being deposed and they want to say as little as possible, a lot of defensive maneuvering. And really with the podcast environment, if you’re telling stories through podcasts, it has to be telling stories. It’s not, nobody wants to listen to a deposition, right? Unless it’s a really compelling deposition. But generally, people want to hear stories. They want you to draw out stories from the executives or from the guest. so that there’s something worth listening to.
Dan
Yep.
Jamie
And it is a different type of interviewing and it’s a different type of skill set that the executives need. I’m sure you guys in your executive training have to tell them, this is different. You don’t give yes, no answers, right? You need to elaborate. You need to give people something they can hang their thoughts on.
Dan
Yeah, exactly. I mean, we’ve always had kind of the variation in media training or things like that, where it’s for print, for broadcast, for this. Now, you’re right, there is a whole new element for podcasts, for webcasts, for all these different methods of speaking that didn’t exist, you know, a whole of years ago. It really has, like, it has changed the way that we look at that, too. You know, beyond that, beyond the podcast medium, though, talk a little bit about more generally changes in journalism in, you mentioned the opportunity to go to the Tokyo show and just kind of like be a sponge, gather things, learn the industry. I mean, how has that kind of work changed or how have those kind of opportunities changed over the years for newer journalists to build thought leadership, build their expertise on the world that they cover?
Jamie
It really seems like those opportunities are limited. It’s just you just look around, right? All the newsrooms are smaller than they used to be. There’s fewer of them, and they’re smaller individually. You think about suppliers, we were talking about earlier, how the suppliers have changed, right? When I came to Detroit 25 years ago, there were a lot of people covering suppliers, including me at the Detroit Free Press. Well, we’ve moved on nowadays, in a metrics-driven world, nobody covers suppliers, right? At Bloomberg, we’d cover supply, write up supplier, and I think I had two supplier reporters when I started there. You know, by the time I left, we didn’t cover them at all because you’d write the stories and hardly anyone would read them. And it just, you can’t justify spending even 2 hours of a highly paid reporter’s time just to produce something because you feel like you owe it to history. You owe it to your shareholders to make good use out of people. So you end up seeing a lot more stories written about Tesla or stories that aren’t even about Tesla but have Tesla in the headline because you want people to click on it. But the coverage of suppliers has really struggled. Automotive News still has John Irwin doing a really good job, but he’s also picking up General Motors. So he’s going to, he has a lot on his plate. But so many other places just don’t have anybody thinking about suppliers. And it’s challenging. I think the key for that to break through is to have bigger, better stories to tell, either a really deep dive on a company and their strategy, or something that looks across all the big players and what’s the big trend going on with them. But it’s a challenge.
Dan
Yeah. And I guess from a, just from, as you look ahead to this kind of like thought leadership position or kind of building your own thought leadership, what I guess, why do you, why did you put so much emphasis on that as a journalist throughout your career of like building your own expertise or what are some of the ways that you looked at doing that?
Jamie
Well, you know, it’s funny. You just, as a journalist, as a reporter, that’s what you do, right? You try to get to know more about the subject than everybody else and figure out better ways to explain it. We didn’t call it thought leadership. It was just doing the job. But over time, that term emerged, right? And I kind of put myself back a year ago. I would have just thought of it as a BS buzzword. But then three people approached me in about a week after I had posted that I was out looking for work and they all referenced thought leadership. So I, they believe it, and that’s what they want to pay for. So I’m like, I’m going to leave them all right into that. And the truth is, I mean, I have more thoughts than most people and I have reasons for them and I can explain them. So, you know, I’ll take the term. I think it works well. And I think it’s just, Here’s the thing, and this is my concern about the kids not getting the opportunities coming up where they can do a lot of deep reporting, where they can really get to know somebody. I’m going to take a quick break here to tell a story. When I was at Bloomberg, I had a reporter assigned to my team who hadn’t had any automotive experience at all. And he was going to cover suppliers. And I said, okay, well, you’ve got a T&E card. Get out there and meet people. take people to lunch and then come back and tell me what you learned. And he’d go to lunch with somebody and they’d come back and they’d say, oh yeah, everything is going electric. I’m like, oh, that guy’s full of crap. And then I’d explain to him, you know, what was right, I thought about the message he got or what I thought was maybe some of the nuance, some of the things that weren’t right. And he’d go to somebody else and they’d come back and they’d say, oh, everything’s about China. Oh, that guy’s full of crap. And you know, we’d sort of talk it through. And over the course of about two months, he had a really thorough understanding. What did people out there think? What was my critique? What was his editor’s critique of their talking points? And it really gave him a good understanding, and he was able to then really take off and do the job the way it needed to be done. So I’m worried that reporters, journalists today aren’t getting the chance. They’re having to write stories before they’re really ready. They don’t really have necessarily have experienced editors who’ve been on the beat. So it makes it really hard to develop that deep knowledge.
Brent Snavely
Yeah. And that’s really interesting because that’s actually something we often tell executives in our media, especially in our media training sessions, is that what has happened is the middle ranks of editors have been gutted and there’s less institutional knowledge in newspapers and therefore less of a safety net and the mentoring, less of a mentoring process for reporters to grow. And I don’t know how to fix that right now, unfortunately.
Dan
So yeah, I mean, I mean, At a certain level, and it can’t be one-sided, but at a certain level, it kind of falls on the companies to educate people on, what’s going on in the world and being more, ideally more transparent. You don’t want to take anybody’s word for, 100% truth without knowing some background, but it’s, I guess that’s part of, working with media now is maybe keeping that in mind and being more conscious that there might be some level of education or a bit more of that needed.
Jamie
Yeah. As there probably always should have been, but that’s definitely something to keep in mind. And you were asking like, why really to lean into it? So I’m sorry, I was talking about the learning portion, but kind of, for me and where I am, and I’m not alone, but it’s that thought leadership, whether it’s the label or it’s just the actually knowing stuff, that is the defense for journalists against AI. Because AI is, so many searches now are zero click. People just see what the AI tells them and they accept it. But then maybe they go to a podcast to try to learn something more. And it’s, they have to know that you know what you’re talking about, that they have some idea about who you are, that they care who’s talking.
Dan
Yeah, there’s trust there.
Jamie
Because otherwise, You might as well just trust Google. And as risky as that might be, but that’s the most convenient, that’s the easiest thing to do. But then it’s like, okay, when you really want to know, okay, I’m going to listen to this NBA expert, I’m going to listen to this politics expert, I’m going to listen to this automotive expert. So I think that’s that’s the thing that everybody needs to try to get to, whether they call themselves a thought leader or just a journalist.
Brent Snavely
Are you seeing, to the extent you can talk about it, how was Automotive News using AI? Are you seeing journalists use AI? And can they use it to educate themselves and bring themselves up to speed in place of that mentor that they may have had before?
Jamie
I think that part’s risky, because we know AI has a lot of hallucinations and all that. But yes, I mean, I think it’s still a useful tool, including, I mean, one of the most important things I learned from the first time I used, when ChatGPT first burst on the scene and seemed quite disappointing, like remarkable and yet disappointing, was that we were asking simple questions. Like, who is and in it, you put in your name, right? And it’s going to find stuff, and some of it might be accurate, but it’s also going to make stuff up because it doesn’t really know. So now we know, okay, if you’re going to use an LLM, a ChatGPT, or a Claude, you’ve got to give it at least 650 data points, either that many words or a spreadsheet with labels and numbers on it so that it has something to work with.
Dan
It can find the patterns and the trends and build up that.
Jamie
And so if you don’t give it really specific instructions, again, like what do we say now, a voice, a character to write in, now we know better how to coach them. I still don’t think you want to use AI to do your journalism. I think that would be very risky. But just to help maybe scan a document or certainly for transcription, But you asked about Automotive News. I mean, they just recently launched a new product on the, it’s mostly tied to the data center, although it uses information from the newsroom, not from the data center at this point. But you ask a question in regular language, and it will find stories and information to give you an answer.
Dan
Yeah.
Jamie
It’s not perfect. I used it the other day and it had missed a recent story. I kind of still thought Honda had three EVs coming out of Ohio soon for the market and it no longer does. But, you know, they’re working on it and trying to really figure out how to make the tool work and provide, I think, provide the audience with the ability to sift through a lot of information that they otherwise, it’s not everybody can spend every day or all week reading everything that Automotive Base writes.
Dan
Yeah, I mean, the way people are searching just more generally is changing so greatly over the past, since the introduction of AI or since, the last year or so, it’s a lot more of that like talk to search almost. And the way that you can have more of that, the more you can have that conversational approach to finding information or to direct people there, I think, that seems to be the way that everybody’s moving or trying to move at least.
Jamie
Yeah, we all get to be Iron Man.
Dan
Yeah, exactly.
Jamie
And just tell the bot what we want and it’ll find it for us. We are our partner.
Dan
So we talked a lot about changes in journalism throughout your career recently, but I guess as you look ahead, what are some of the things that you’re just tracking in the auto industry nowadays? What’s on your mind that you’re watching?
Jamie
I mean, this is such an incredibly turbulent time.
Dan
Yeah, it’s a loaded question.
Jamie
In so many ways, the macro trends and the shorter term noise, obviously the war in Iran, who knows how long that’s going to last. Hopefully it’ll, the fighting will stop before this podcast airs, but I don’t know if we’ll be that fortunate. You know, the tariff policies and it just had the story and it’s, you know, it’s saying Automakers have identified $35 billion worth of tariffs paid in about a year. So that’s a little more than $2,000 per vehicle. How’s that going to roll out going forward? Is there enough mitigation strategies? We’re really starting to see prices come up. Affordability is continuing to be a bigger and bigger problem.
Dan
Yeah, has that number even hit the lot yet or hit the price tags on lots?
Jamie
Mostly not. Mostly the automakers are just eating it. They’re starting to tick up a few $100 and they’re adding money to the destination charges and delivery charges. So that doesn’t necessarily show up on the MSRP.
Dan
Okay.
Jamie
But also, I mean, with the war going on, with all the tariffs, the actual cost of shipping vehicles is going to go up.
Dan
Yeah, so oil price effects.
Jamie
Oil price effects. And also the inconvenience, right? I mean, not so much for the US market where whatever. The vast majority of our vehicles are made here in North America, but on the global stage, the Japanese and Europeans and Koreans, war in the Middle East is going to interfere with how they can send ships full of trucks around the world.
Brent Snavely
Yeah. One of our clients did a couple interviews this week, France Montarta with Forvia, and was talking about exactly that with a couple different reporters, the transportation costs. The increased transportation costs are one of the things that they’re watching really, really closely.
Jamie
Yeah.
Brent Snavely
So go ahead.
Jamie
No, go ahead and finish that one.
Brent Snavely
I was related to all of this and I’m wondering if this is now the time or if we’re very close to cost of vehicles going up because it has largely, automakers have largely held the line. In part, I think, because the vehicles are already pretty expensive, but do you think that will, is soon going to break through and change with increasing vehicle prices?
Jamie
I think we’re going to see prices steadily going up. It’s just, there can be some political pressure and some arm twisting on automaker executives, but only for so long. And, you know, Toyota, of course, Toyota took a big chunk of that, 35 billion, 9 billion of it was Toyota. And it’s been a really curious to watch them continue to push growth even when it’s costing them money. They lost money in North America two of the last three quarters, which is kind of shocking. But Toyota plays a long game, and that’s their strategy. I’ll tell you the other thing, though, that’s going to make vehicles so much more expensive than even they are now, and that’s automated driving. We kind of see it already with the highly advanced driver assistance systems like Super Cruise and Blue Cruise. But as we’re seeing, Google is here, Waymo is here in Detroit trying to figure out how to drive in snow and heavy rain and potholes. You’re seeing robo-taxis expand all across the smile states. It’s easy to miss it in Detroit and Chicago but they are moving and moving, so millions of people are going to get their first robotaxi rides this year, and it’s like it’s a hard thing to accept until you ride in one, and then you’re like, Oh, this is actually pretty boring, right? And which is what it should be, right? Yeah, and so… You talk about those vehicles with lots of extra sensors, lots of extra computing power, those are all going to be super expensive, but they could really change the dynamic of the industry. If more people decide, I don’t need to own a car, I only need one or two instead of two or three or four in the family, and they start using robotaxis, it’s going to change, you know, this whole Uber economy where people, you have a little hard time. go drive Uber for a few hours, right? That’s not going to be available. Maybe getting around will get a lot cheaper. Maybe it will get safer. We can hope so, but it will be very disruptive for auto dealers and a lot of other people if that becomes a major form of transportation in this country.
Dan
All that volume goes somewhere else into different manufacturers, potentially. You know, you’re talking about Waymo, like that’s…
Brent Snavely
And dramatic implications for how the whole vehicle is designed and the entire supply chain as well.
Jamie
Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, if it’s in a perfect world, right, with perfected automated vehicles, you wouldn’t need the airbags and the bumpers and even insurance costs could go way down. We’re a long way from that, obviously, but it will change dramatically, the design and the demands on suppliers. The whole usage, right? They’ll be used much more during the day, not as much sitting time. Maybe they don’t need to be as durable in terms of time, but definitely much more durable in terms of miles. And I guess the one other thing I would throw in there is I feel like everybody is assuming away the challenge of cleanliness They tend to forget how disgusting humans are when they’re not being observed. Maybe they’ll have cameras and microphones and they’ll keep track of people and you’ll get a rating as a passenger. But people are going to leave their McDonald’s wrappers behind. They’re going to leave coffee because they’re going to spill their coffee. They’re going to sneeze and wipe it, you know, and it’s going to need to, or worse, right? And so, you know, I think there’s going to need to be systems in place to get cars detailed or cleaned up, re-cleaned a lot more often than people are assuming now. And that’s going to make it harder to do a dollar a mile car.
Dan
Never would have thought of that. Yeah, that’s a great point though. Okay, well, we started with the start of your career. We’re going to roll right back to that at the end here. So I guess, tell us maybe one thing that you’ve learned throughout your career that you wish you would have known as you were, moving into Kentucky. what was starting out with your first job? What’s something that you’ve, what would something that you’d tell yourself going into that first job?
Jamie
Yeah, I mean, if I have like a regret slash lesson, it’s probably I should have done a better job of hoarding people’s names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and job titles. I wish I had a more thorough Rolodex from all the decades I’ve been doing this. You know, and some of it, I think, was, you know, you change positions, you change companies, and you kind of, you lose all your files that you had before. And then especially as I became an editor, I really didn’t want to get in the way of my reporters. I wanted to let them have their own relationships with the companies they’re covering. And there’s maybe it would have been better to be a little more selfish or at least, you know, stick my nose in a little more and try to get in front of more of those executives sometimes. But I don’t know. I feel good about I think when you’re an editor, your job is to support your reporters, to make them better, to put them in position to win, and help them develop the relationships that are going to let them win. Because then they win, they, say they win for you, but then you get to win. The only way you win as an editor is when your reporters win. So you want to set them up to win. And, you know, I’m glad that I did that. I probably should have done better at saying, hey, what was that person’s phone number? Let me share that with me in case I need to check on the fact with you.
Dan
Keep the relationships going.
Brent Snavely
I got to say that resonates in some ways. I mean, often I’ve thought, and I also have learned, didn’t recognize it as much earlier, but relationships in this business, both the journalism business and the auto industry, matter so much. And trust and credibility go so far. And if you don’t have that, it’s a struggle. So yeah, great lesson, I think, to learn and to pass on.
Jamie
Yep. Some people you never see again, but a lot of them you do. Over and over, or they disappear from your life and they come right back in. And it’s, of course, look, the other thing I think I learned that maybe I didn’t know as well, 20 or 30 years ago was people, sometimes, not many, but sometimes people do change. And someone could be really challenging to work with. And then you cross paths with them again 5 or 10 years later, and they’re super easy. maybe they were going through something in their life, or they’re just mature in a different way. Or even if you used to battle, 5 or 10 years later, you can kind of look back fondly at that, you know? And then when you meet up, you’re like, hey, it’s so good to see you. And you might even mean it.
Dan
Yeah, It’s I mean, it’s. It’s hard sometimes when there are conflicts like that, but walking away without burning a bridge is always, that’s a huge thing.
Jamie
Yeah. And you have to be comfortable with conflict up in to a certain extent, right? The job of the reporter is not to just accept everything they’re told. So sometimes you have to push back and sometimes people don’t want to hear that and they’ll argue back with you and you have to stay calm and try to focus on the facts and not get upset personally or get upset with them personally. But it’s just the nature of the business. And again, thinking about thoughts, you have to be able to stay kind of objective and removed.
Dan
Yeah. Well, thanks so much. I appreciate you coming on and this is great catching up with you and hope to have you back here soon to talk about what’s coming up next.
Jamie
Thanks, Dan. It was really great to be here. It’s a beautiful office you guys have, and great to see you guys too. You too, Brent.
Brent Snavely
Very good. Take care. Thanks A lot.
Dan
Thanks. Well, thanks so much to Jamie again for joining us here on frankly. Thanks to Brent for serving as my guest co-host today. If you haven’t yet, follow along with Jamie on LinkedIn. We’ll include a link to the description below here so you can keep up on all things related to the Butters Bureau. And thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time.
