Larissa Padden 00:01

Hello and welcome to Cogcast, Cognito’s podcast, where we talk to journalists and media pros on everything that’s happening in the world of media and PR. I’m Larissa Padden, your host and a former journalist turned PR professional.

 

For today’s episode, we are joined by Peter Valdes-Depena, a former CNN reporter turned Substack author. Peter has had a long and interesting career, through which he has seen a lot of change, with a strong track record, correctly predicting the shifts in media and planning accordingly. That will make more sense when you listen. Peter was kind enough to discuss how he has seen the industry change and where he thinks it’s headed next. Please enjoy and check out his Substack, In-Car, which you can find at incar.substack.

 

So, thanks, Peter, for joining us here today and in person.

 

Peter Dapena 00:45

Thank you.

 

Larissa Padden 00:47

Great. So I want to start by having you tell us a little bit about your background, what you’ve been doing in journalism over the years, and then how you found your way to writing your newsletter In-Car.

 

Peter Dapena 00:58

Well, I started in journalism in the 1990s. I went to grad school in the 1990s, and at that time, pretty much all of the other students in my master’s class were going to go onto newspapers. I pretty much knew early on I wanted to work in the internet, because it seemed to me like that was just the ultimate news delivery device, which we don’t even think about now, right?

 

But at the time, if you remember, like publication, your news came to you in a paper form in the morning, and if your paper had a website, they didn’t want to publish the news on the website until the paper came out in the morning. And I also wanted to be a business reporter, because I decided, look, I’m being practical, that’s where the work is. A lot of other folks wanted to do sports or wanted to do local news; I wanted to do business.

 

So that’s where I started out. I started out working for a publication in Miami, the Miami Daily Business Review. After a while, I did briefly leave journalism, worked as a science writer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and then came back. An old editor of mine from the Daily Business Review in Miami hired me to help Money magazine, which then I went over to CNN to start CNNMoney, and started working at the business publication there.

 

Now, this is where it gets interesting. Because I knew a lot about cars. My dad raced as a hobby and grew up with car magazines being around the house, car and driver, road and track, and they kind of needed somebody to cover autos. And I knew that, and I’m like, hey, I’m there. And so that’s when I really started writing about cars, and this was about 25 years ago, and started covering autos for CNN and was doing that for about 25 years. First, other things as well, but pretty quickly it got narrowed down to just that was my beat.

 

Larissa Padden 03:02

That’s interesting. And I think you and I chatted about this when we met a little bit. So when I went to grad school for journalism, the program was magazine, newspaper, online. And at that point, which wasn’t that long ago, they didn’t know how to teach for online, because it was still unclear how the news was going to evolve in the online world, because it was still a very print media landscape at that point. So it is wild to see how quickly things change.

 

Peter Dapena 03:28

Oh, it was amazing. I mean, at that time, I don’t think there was—we had digital journalism. We did, but the focus was on using computers for reporting, using spreadsheets, using analysis online. No one was really teaching at that time. I think now, University of Miami now does have digital journalism. But at the time, no one was teaching about how to write for the internet, or how to use links, and things like that. I taught myself HTML and started doing my own stuff.

 

So it was clear to me. And what’s super interesting thing was, I realized right away, the best online news source in 1995 was CNN.com, because CNN was already in the 24/7 news business. They had no problem repackaging a TV script and putting it out online. I didn’t even realize at the time it was brand new, and I certainly didn’t realize that a few years later, I’d end up working there.

 

Larissa Padden 04:29

That’s interesting. I’ll give a shout out. My first job after graduation was at CNNMoney.com here in New York. And even at that time, looking back at the system they had, which was tech-savvy then, seems antiquated now. The way we used to have to put in links, and grab graphics, and pair it up with a poll or something, it was very manual still.

 

Peter Dapena 04:48

Oh, yeah. And when I left, it’s much more seamless now. It really looks like you’re writing on the web page. And I can remember, I think I recall the time you were talking about, when it took people forever just to figure out how to write a story in that. And you had no idea what it was going to look like, because it didn’t look anything like when it was published.

 

Larissa Padden 05:12

Yeah, it was very separate too, at least in my time, I was hired to do that, the packaging. And maybe if I was lucky, I would get to write. But the writers were still just doing the writing. And so even then, you didn’t really have to know that functionality to be a reporter.

 

Peter Dapena 05:25

Right. And now you do. Now you do everything, beginning to end, soup to nuts, from the start to the beginning. You put the pictures in, you write the captions. But it’s so much easier, because it’s like, okay, I want the picture to go right here, and I can put that picture right there, and there it is.

 

Larissa Padden 05:38

Right. Well, I wanted to touch on the racing thing. I am an F1 fan. And obviously, I’m interested to talk about that. I won’t spend this whole podcast talking about that. I could talk about the season just alone for far too long. But I wanted to talk about your background in racing and cars. It does sound like there was a little bit of right place, right time to that. But for so many journalists, you end up covering whatever job is offered to you at the time, because it’s so hard to break into journalism. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that journey of turning a personal passion into an entire career.

 

Peter Dapena 06:13

Well, you’re right, there was a bit of luck there. But one of the great things that I love about journalism as a career is that you can follow your passions, and you do have that opportunity. And sometimes you find yourself—I’ve talked to so many journalists who said, “Look, man, I write about life insurance, and people think this is boring. I love it. I found it to be so interesting.”

 

So often journalists find so much interest in things that they never thought they’d be interested in. But when you start pulling that thread, you realize there’s so much to this, and it’s so interesting. So for me, in this case, yeah, that was uneasy. A lot of people like ours, I do too. So it was nice for me to have that opportunity to do that. The interesting thing for me was, of course, I never saw myself writing, working for something like Road & Track.

 

As much as I said I grew up around those magazines, from my time at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where I wrote about cancer, and I learned to write about technical issues, really technical stuff for a lay audience, that’s always what I really like to do. That’s always kind of been where my passion is. I like writing about cars for people who weren’t necessarily car people. And finding that interest and finding the overlap about where something to do with cars, whether it’s the shift to EVs, or whether it’s a performance car.

 

I remember my favorite email I ever got from a reader. I wrote about a Chevrolet Corvette, and driving a Corvette. And a lot of people from car websites made fun of me for it, because they thought the story was dumb and silly. Somebody sent me an email and said, “You know what, I bought a Prius, because that’s what Consumer Reports said was the best car. I’ve never considered driving a sports car. Now that I read your story, I understand why people drive sports cars. I understand what the excitement is about that. And now I’d love to drive that car.”

 

That to me was the kind of thing I would really love to get across to somebody. I love it when somebody who isn’t a car person finds one of my stories about cars interesting.

 

Larissa Padden 08:23

Yeah. I think both in my professional experience and then just personal experience, it’s that some of the best articles I’ve ever read that remain in my brain are about things you didn’t think would be interesting when you began reading it. And maybe you just read it because you were on a plane, or it was in the magazine that you bought.

 

But I also used to cover auto lending, and it was genuinely the job that was offered to me at the time. And I loved the subject matter. I thought it was so interesting. And looking at the bigger picture of American consumers, and the lending space, and the resiliency coming out of the recovery from the Great Recession, it was just such an interesting world to be in. But when I tell people how interesting that is, they think I’m crazy. So it is always really amazing to see a good reporter with a good nose for a story, with good writing, can really change people’s mind on something.

 

Peter Dapena 09:12

Well, believe it or not, it’s not so different being a car writer here in New York City. I can’t tell you how many cocktail party conversations just start to shut down the minute I say I write about cars. People in this place—and I very often have to explain to people why I’m interested in cars, what’s fascinating about it, because they don’t get it. They have no idea why anyone would give a darn about these things.

 

And yeah, I have to explain to somebody that cars are like what cathedrals were in the Middle Ages. They are the ultimate expression of design, engineering, marketing, every aspect of human endeavor is encapsulated in this one industry and this one product.

 

And so the great thing about being a car writer is I can write a design story one day, a technology story the next day, a business story the next day, and a social issue story the day after that, because this industry and these products encompass just so much.

 

Larissa Padden 10:19

Well, I also wanted to go back a little bit about the span of your career and having seen it evolve into what it is now, having seen the foresight of the internet and the way it was going to change the industry, I wanted to get your thoughts on how it continues to change.

 

You see, it’s already so hard to be a journalist. It’s always been hard to be a journalist. This industry has gone through multiple layoffs throughout the year for various reasons, one of them being the internet, and now looking at newsrooms continuing to shrink, AI being swapped out for writers, and I just kind of want to get your thoughts on where things are headed.

 

Peter Dapena 10:50

Yeah. I mean, you see, it’s much harder because right now, for example, whether it’s CNN or it was Yahoo back in the day or whatever, people consume news differently, right? I mean, because they don’t go, “Oh, news happened, I’m going go to this news website.” It’s like, “News happened, I’m going to go to Google and see what stories Google has,” or “I’m going go to Apple News and see what’s on Apple News,” and it’s all these different outlets.

 

That changes things a lot. Certainly, it changed things for me because as an auto writer, my specialty was I could write car stories that someone coming to a homepage like CNN would be there for other things, and they’d say, “Oh, there’s a car story. I don’t usually read car stories, but that one looks interesting.”

 

Well, nowadays, people coming for car stories, they may not come to it that way. They may be like, Google is saying, well, you’re interested in cars, so I’m going to serve you stories about cars. You’re not interested in cars, I’m going to tend to not send you stories about cars. Kind of changes things.

 

And you have websites like The Autopian that are clearly—I don’t work there, but I gather that their whole shtick is, ‘We want find the car stories that no one else is writing, so they have incredibly original, different content.’ So it’s harder to stand out. I think it’s harder to stand out, and it’s harder to know and capture the audience you necessarily want to capture because so much has to do with algorithms, search algorithms, social media algorithms, and that makes the world so much harder.

 

Or someone else explained to me a while ago that it used to be when I first left grad school, freelancers, the whole shtick for a freelancer was, “I’m going to go to this, cover this one event, cover it three different ways for three different publications.” It’s harder to do now when everything’s on the internet. Because I can’t write a story for this newspaper in Montana and another story for the newspaper in Maine.

 

Larissa Padden 12:55

It’s all connected, yeah.

 

Peter Dapena 12:56

It’s much harder to do that. So it really has changed a lot of ways. And now we have AI, which I’ve been working closely with, but we have AI that if I want to know, hey, what did Jimmy Kimmel say last night, well, I can search that, and sure, I’ll get 20 stories about what Jimmy Kimmel said on TV, but I’ll also get an AI summary of what Jimmy Kimmel said on TV that maybe is linked out to a story. And I’m not saying I have the answers, but it’s much more challenging.

 

Larissa Padden 13:31

Yeah. I think it’s changed—I mean, it continues to change the way we consume everything. People don’t watch shows anymore, they watch clips, and then the more clips you watch, the more other things you get fed. And so I think that it makes some things easier and it makes some things more challenging, which is how do you organically find news anymore?

 

Peter Dapena 13:50

Right. How do you organically find news, and how do you maintain a trusted brand? Because it still matters, branding still matters. There are outlets that I will see in my feed that I won’t click on, because I’ve clicked on them before, and I know they have clickbait headlines, I know they have stories where they bury the lead eight paragraphs down because they want me to—I’m not going to those.

 

If I see CNN in my feed, and I see the New York Times in my feed, I’ll go to those trusted news sources. It still matters—that branding, that kind of gravitas still has meaning, but it’s a different environment.

 

Larissa Padden 14:31

Well, part of the evolution of the industry is Substack, which is where you publish your newsletter, so I wanted to ask you a little bit, this is something that we’re talking more with clients about, we’re seeing it rise in popularity in more sectors than others, we’re seeing a lot of reporters build their own brand outside of traditional media on Substack, and so I wanted to ask why you chose Substack for your platform.

 

Peter Dapena 14:55

Well, because when I first left CNN, one of the first things people said to me was, “You gotta start at Substack.” And I was like, “Nah, I don’t want to do that.” I mean, I didn’t see so many people were doing it. It took me a while because I wanted to do something, I just don’t want to write about cars, there’s plenty of people writing about cars out there—plenty of people. I wanted to do something different that wasn’t being done, where I felt was an interesting arena within that industry that needed more exploration and deeper exploration than it was currently at.

 

And from driving a different car, being in a different car, I noticed there was one thing I was always interested in, is kind of like, yeah, the performance is all good, the driving quality is all good, the battleground is the interior. It’s the interior. Quality is the interior, not just the quality, but the technology in the interior of the car, how you use it, different gear selectors.

 

As I said, I wrote a story about Cadillac using video on the interior of the car. Lincoln has been super creative in terms of creating a meditation space inside the car, because they’ve realized that the car, for many people, is kind of a third space, right? You drive to work, you drive home, a lot of people, when they get home, don’t just immediately get out of the car and go inside. They’ll sit in there for a few minutes.

 

Larissa Padden 16:27

Decompress.

 

Peter Dapena 16:27

And decompress. And so Lincoln has leaned into that and really said, “We’re going to make a space for you to decompress.” They’ve teamed up with the Calm app folks, so you can have like a little meditation experience inside your vehicle, and it even has nice perfume smells. I mean, and they’ve really leaned into that.

 

And that’s the kind of thing, I think, that car companies are using to set themselves apart from one another. Because, really, it’s true, we’ve really gotten to a point, the days when I used to occasionally get into a car and I’d be like, “Oh my God, this thing is a complete piece of garbage. It’s horrible.” It doesn’t happen anymore. That rarely happens anymore.

 

But I do get into cars and I’m like, “Oh, look at this neat widget over here. This is cool. I never thought of that.” “Look at what I can do with the interior lights on this car.” Look at how BMW has got these amazing use of lights. If you ever get inside a BMW, they’re so creative with light design inside their cars. And that kind of stuff, it’s interesting to me and it’s something I wanted to write about.

 

Now, I hope people want to read about it, more people want to read about it, but it is super interesting for me to write about. It’s super creative and it’s an opportunity for me to experiment with things like using AI in my own writing process where it’s just me. I’m in control. I can decide how much is me, how much is AI, and all that stuff and really explore for myself, work process, writing process and the kind of stuff I want to cover.

 

Larissa Padden 17:57

So you’ve touched on a couple examples of brands that you’ve interacted with and written about on Substack. How are brands, from your observation, and companies interacting with creators on Substack? And are people making money from brand partnerships the way we see influencers in other space? How is that space evolving?

 

Peter Dapena 18:16

I gotta be honest with you, I haven’t gotten into that yet. I hope so. My wife keeps saying to me, “When are we going to make money from this?” And I’m like, “Hold on. Probably not. We’ll see. Probably not soon.”

 

The brands themselves, I’ve had several lawmakers already coming to me with ideas for this. I think they like it. If we can move in that direction, I would certainly love to discuss with somebody deeper partnerships. But certainly, I think, it’s been really interesting to see how enthused they are. Because at first, I kind of thought, if I tell somebody, “Well, look, this is nice, I don’t have an outlet for it, but I’m going to write about it for my Substack,” I thought it would be like a sad trombone. But now, they’re like, “Cool, great, I love that.” They really are into it, and it’s been great.

 

Larissa Padden 19:07

So companies, brands, they’re engaging. What about PR? Do you get pitched to like you used to? Are you on media lists and traditional PR companies reach out to you? Or are most of your actions just brand specific?

 

Peter Dapena 19:23

No, I still do get pitched to from time to time. Some automakers and some outlets, more so than others. But I still do rarely get pitched to. I’m always happy when somebody pitches to me, even if I can’t use that particular story this time out. They might have something else, and I’m happy to have the interaction, and happy to have the relationship still.

 

And then there are stories that people pitch to me that I’m like, “Okay, I love that story, don’t have anybody for it right now, but I’m going to keep this in the back of my mind so that when I find the outlet for it, I’m going to be right there with this one because it’s a cool story.”

 

Larissa Padden 20:03

And I ask this for our learning purposes here, and we’ve spoken on here a little bit about maybe undervaluing freelancers just because there’s less transparency on how the process works, or understanding, I guess. As a freelancer, how could PR work in a more helpful manner with you? Is it simply just including you on pitches?

 

Peter Dapena 20:26

Sure. I mean, yes, well, for starters, of course, yes. Including me on pitches, remembering that I’m out here, but including me on pitches, and also working with me. When I was at CNN, I would spend a lot of time, if I had a pitch that was almost there, almost good enough, I can’t tell you how many times I spent 20 minutes, half an hour on the phone with a PR person saying, “Let’s work on this. There’s something here, let’s see what we can work on, and make it something better. So let’s do that. Maybe there’s something here.”

 

Or if you’re a PR person, and I love it, and I’ve had this happen a few times, where somebody said, “Hey, look, I just pitched this story to such-and-such a public agent, they didn’t have a writer for it, let me hook you. Do you mind? Give this guy a break, I think we might be able to put something together here.” So that’s super helpful. Also, I’ve landed a few stories, a couple stories that way.

 

But mostly it’s really just about, hey, remember that I’m here, pitch me the ideas, even if it’s not 100% on the money, even if it’s not something I can use now, you may have something later that I can use, keep the lines open.

 

Larissa Padden 21:44

Well, it sounds like so many things change in this industry, and the basic rule that we discuss with clients doesn’t change, which is, it’s a relationship game. You build relationships, you build it with sources, you build it with reporters, you build it with PR, and you kind of strengthen those relationships. And it sounds like that’s still a big factor in how you find stories and how you find sources.

 

Peter Dapena 22:07

100%, 100%. I mean, I’m a little bit of a babe in the woods in some ways, because let’s face it, I was a staff writer for more than 20 years. And freelancing’s different, right? And so it’s a different world, different kind of relationships, and I’m still on a learning curve myself with a lot of this stuff, because it’s not the world I was in before.

 

Larissa Padden 22:31

Yeah. So as someone that has seen a lot of change and seemed to successfully predict that change, where do you think we’re going next? Is Substack going to be the next rising platform? Is there a world in which that kind of starts to challenge traditional media as people look to have control over their own brand more? Where do you see the industry going next?

 

Peter Dapena 22:57

Well, in short, the answer to that, I think, is yes. Substack, platforms like that, people who just have their own websites, I think it’s going to start. Because, like I was saying, when people consume news nowadays, they go to something like Google, an aggregator essentially, and look at all the sources that are available. So I think building your own brand is important, is super important in that environment.

 

And yeah, I think Substack in particular, but possibly other outlets, and I said people just doing their own website thing, is going to become an increasingly important thing to do. I have colleagues who left CNN who only did that, and just said, “Right. I’m just starting my own thing, I’m doing it, and that’s it. I’m committing myself 100% to just that.”

 

Larissa Padden 23:42

Well, Peter, this has been great, and you’ve been very generous with your time. I always try to end with a fun question, and I wanted to know, what is the car you’ve always wanted to drive, and you haven’t gotten to yet?

 

Peter Dapena 23:55

Wow, that’s a tough one, you mean always?

 

Larissa Padden 23:58

Always, it could be a classic, it could be something new you’ve learned recently, new technology that’s been implemented you haven’t been able to try, always.

 

Peter Dapena 24:06

Well, okay, well first of all, I’m sorry, this was in an always one, because it’s kind of new. I have not driven that, I’m super curious about the Dodge Charger EV, the electric, which has not been a success in the marketplace. But I’m still curious to know, wait a minute, was it not a success in the marketplace due to execution on the part of the car, or is it just because, for whatever reason, electric cars have become a wedge issue, and it’s just the wrong market for an EV, because those folks want the rumble of a gas engine.

 

But to me, an electric muscle car sounds like that could be a really good thing, that could be a really good fit for that technology. And I still haven’t gotten to drive that yet, I haven’t driven that yet, so I’m still hoping to drive that one. In terms of cars lifelong, I have pictures of my dad with a Porsche Speedster, a 1950s Porsche Speedster. And I would be super curious, he drove those cars, he raced them, I’ve never driven one.

 

Larissa Padden 25:10

Wow.

 

Peter Dapena 25:11

And these days, they’re pretty rare. I mean, those are pretty valuable cars nowadays. I would love to get in that and drove the car he drove, if I ever get the chance.

 

Larissa Padden 25:23

Those seem like very different answers, and also very interesting. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for coming in.

 

Peter Dapena 25:30

Thank you.