Revenge of the Nerd
Goodbye SCC, Hello motoIQ
A lot of you are probably familiar with me and my name, you probably know me from the pages of Sport Compact Car Magazine. I have been actively involved with the publication of SCC for the last 14 years since editor Larry Saavedra "discovered" me as a writer in early 1995. Larry was the one largely responsible for elevating SCC to its position as the premier tech based magazine for the import/compact performance market, a position it held until the publisher pulled the plug a few months ago.
Larry put together the dream team of Dave Coleman, Josh Jacquot and Jared Holstein as staff editors with Shiv Pathak and myself as the tech freelance editors. Those days were fun as we strove to explain the ins and outs of the sometimes complex world of high performance. We had a lot of autonomy in those days and wrote things as we saw it. The readers responded to this making SCC the number 1 magazine in the segment. Then slowly things became more "corporate", SCC was hamstrung, its budget halfed with its editorial funds being funneled into other weaker magazines in the publishers catalogue to "beef them up" leaving SCC's editors to try to create great content out of nothing.
In this environment things were difficult but a great product was still produced fueled by the passion of the editors. What finally killed SCC was a combination of several things; the first thing was the internet which is being blamed for the decline of print media in general. The second thing was a decline in the compact car performance market in general, the unusually long-legged fad that fueled the tremendous growth that the market enjoyed for more than a decade ran out of steam and the cool kids went elsewhere in droves. With the masses leaving the market, there were not enough of the hardcore readers that loved SCC’s no-nonsense, no girlie format to keep circulation up. Budgets were tightened more and more, the magazine got thinner and thinner, more readers and advertisers left leading SCC into an unrecoverable death spin. The souring economy drove the last nail into the coffin and the publishers sent SCC to the dust bin, saddening its fans.
Much thanks to Larry Saavedra, Scott Oldham, Ed Loh, Josh Jacquot, and Joey Leh- All of you got it, understanding the SCC creedo and vision in your own individual ways. It was an honor to work for each and every one of you. All of you taught me a lot from many different angles.
So here we are. I believe that the hardcore are still out there, I believe that your editorial needs are not anywhere close to being filled by the current publications on the shelves at the newsstands or on low signal to noise ratio internet user group forums. We are not corporate, we are independents, we are lean mean and nimble, responsive to your interests.
If you are reading this, I believe you miss SCC. Well, I am here, Dave Coleman is here, as well as a bunch of other equally hardcore and capable car freaks and nerds. Let me introduce our staff starting with our editorial people;
First is Dave Coleman, Dave was the engineering editor at SCC from 1997-2005 now he is an engineer with Mazda doing secret stuff.
Annie Sam is an avid racer and driving instructor, Annie was a Senior editor with NPM, our online mag from a few years ago.
Sarah Forst is a well known author from the performance scene. Sarah had a long running column with NPM and has recently published a Nissan tuning book with HP.
Eric Hsu is an engineer at Coswoth and has a monthly column in Import Tuner. Eric has appeared in just about every magazine in the world and TV.
Other contributers in no particular order are; Wes Dumalski, Martin Gonzales, Steve Rockwood, Chuck Johnson, John McNulty, Aaron Guardado, Dan Gardener, Naji Dahi and Steve Mitchell
Behind the scenes are;
Aaron LaBeau, Nothing would be possible without Aaron, the network ace. His tireless dedication to this project will always be greatly appreciated
Frank Orozco, Frank's web design mastery has greatly sped up our getting this thing off the ground, we are forever in his debt
Jeff Naeyaert, besides having a real hard to spell last name, Jeff is my right hand man, Jeff is the most versatile of all of us having a lot of competence in nearly everything from business development, to writing to photography, video editing and web design
Charlie Barnes is our art guy responsible for a lot of our look, the fact that things look a bit better than your standard web site is his doing.
Mari Umekubo is a photographer.
We will strive to bring you interesting stories, experiences and adventures of car nuts just like you. We will bring you cutting edge tech, we will bring cool project cars. We will leave out the fluff. We think you are as passionate about the scene as we are.
I hope you like it!
Happy Motoring
Mike Kojima
Head Guy, motoIQ