[The Chief (tm)]

Agreed.

Older fella here: C&D used to be my ONLY read, as I was a subscriber starting back in the early '80's, and eventually cancelled in the late '90's.

Part of the problem is the need, these days, to maintain a certain amount of "freshness" in the on-line presence, meaning that they have to post new ("new") stuff every day or so in order to give readers something to click on.

Another part of the problem is that all the major mags are now owned by the same corporation, so you'll see an article that originated at one of the "other" ones, then eventually works its way onto C&D's website. Not necessarily saying that these are of inferior quality, but again, if at any point you bought in to C&D being "the best", and now they're running stuff from the other magazines, well, that's not the same thing.

What disappoints me more is C&D's uneven application of editorial "group memory" and recollection of *it's own past writing*. Now, I have a fairly photographic memory, and I like to state, proudly, that if I say I "don't remember" something, it's because I didn' care enough in the first place. Amusing amongst my friends, not quite as much with the significant other... :-0

I digress.

But I can think of two glaring examples of what I said above. In the first, at one point there was a three-car comparo article featuring a Vette, Nissan GTR and 911. The "win" was given to the Vette because, they said (and this is almost a direct quote, from memory), "although the 911 is the better car, it's not twice as good" (referring to price.)

Not terribly long after that, two-car comparo between Weissach 911 and Z51 Vette. Porsche was something like $327K, Vette in the mid-$150's. Winner? Porsche, at twice the price! Did they either no longer care about the price differential, or was the Porsche actually twice as good? Doesn't hold up either way.

Another one I've been hating for a while: until the unveiling of the latest Prius, the more recent writing team never failed to assail the previous gens for being unworthy of enthusiastic driving -- fair enough, even though that is just about the last thing they were designed for.

But when IIRC the 3rd gen Prius debuted, the big intro article explicitly lauded Toyota for having given each of the (3?) trim levels not merely a different wheel/tire package, but also a correspondinly different steering ratio. No, not a "sports sedan", but even C&D said at least Toyota was paying attention.

Many additional similar examples that I won't bother with here.

So, if a lowly reader can easily recall divergent editorial musings from within the magazine's own body of work, shouldn't the staff be able to do so as well? It's not like the writing team completely changes every two years. They should be able to make sure they don't write something that directly contradicts something they wrote within recallable memory.

Now, back to the just-about-anything-else we were all doing that was more important than this... ;-)