Autoblog, one of the foundational and most influential car blogs on the Web, goes dark later this week. Sort of.
The site has been purchased by the Arena Group — the same folks who were in the news for how they handled the venerable Sports Illustrated earlier this year. The Autopian picked up on a post by a current AB writer to suggest that the site shuts down Thursday, but yours truly has seen Friday bandied about in industry circles as the site's final day.
This is where I disclose that one of our current contributors also does work for AB, and I believe, though I am not sure off the top of my head, that other TTAC contributors have also worked for Autoblog. Certainly there are folks who have bylines on both sites, if not during the same time frame. I also need to disclose that I have personal and professional relationships with several current ABers — it's a small industry, after all.
A quick Google search will show that ages ago, under previous iterations, TTAC and Autoblog had an, um, unique relationship. Your author was not involved in any of these back and forths, so I will let you dig around if you like. What I will say is that Autoblog has been on my reading list for a long time — and we've certainly sourced their work before.
Indications are that Arena Group will continue to run the site, but we'd expect it will be different whenever the next version goes live.
Bon voyage to the current version of one of the original pioneers of the automotive-media internet.
[Image: Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock.com]
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