The newshounds of Bowling Villa

by David Benjamin

LAS VEGAS—At a giant annual trade show whose emphasis is on the all-new and “innovative,” the vibe at the House of Journalists this year was refreshingly old-school.

This residential subset of an immense media presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was launched five years ago by Scott Fosgard, a veteran of public relations in the automotive industry. It included not one “influencer,” that breed of quid-pro-quo social-media commentators who—in the words of one House of Journalist reporter—“monetize their views.”

John Voelcker, invited to this exclusive community of about two dozen journalists, told me to make sure I did not just profile “males with white hair,” like him. But indeed, the majority of this group, recruited by Fosgard from across the United States and Europe, are what Donald Trump might call “on the older side.”

Youngest among the reporters, who bivouacked among houses in the Vegas suburbs and met daily at an HQ called “Bowling Villa,” because it has an actual bowling alley, was Jeremy Wolfe, a twenty-something from Middleton, Wisconsin. But even Wolfe evokes the century-long history of trade journalism, because he represented Fleet Owner, one of the oldest publications covering the trucking industry.

And despite a tradition of male exclusivity in the automotive press, there were women present. Cracks in the glass ceiling were evidenced by the presence of Mindy Long from Transport Topics, Iris Stroh from elektroniknet.de, and my sweetie, Junko Yoshida—who snuck me in as her trailing spouse—plus one bashful lady who objected to being mentioned in this profile.

Five days at Bowling Villa caused me to ponder the traits that define the professional journalist. Perhaps foremost among these “virtues” is occupational nomadism. No reporter can be entirely comfortable still in one place, in one role, living off a single sinecure, for the length of his or her career. Journalism, even in the heyday of print, was never stable. Junko, for example, has experienced the transition from print to cyberspace, beginning with corporate p.r. in Tokyo. Moving to the news with EE Times, she rose over the years from cub reporter to editor-in-chief. Without the luxury of a one permanent “beat,” she has covered technology from consumer electronics to semiconductors, intellectual property, automotive technology, regulation and, lately, AI and robotics. She’s now authoring her second post-EE Times independent digital and video newsletter. She has filed copy from Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Paris and a dozen other European cities, from Long Island and Manhattan, from Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing, from Las Vegas and—perhaps at last—Madison.

There are, of course, reporters who have managed to stay at one post, in one beat, for most of their careers, like John McElroy, whom I deemed the eminence grise of the House of Journalists. In his print days, from the 1970s ’til a few years ago—when he started his “Autoline” videocast—he was a fixture at a monthly trade journal, Automotive Industry. This suggests exceptional stability for a newsman. But in that span, McElroy’s publication went through four different owners, any one of which could have deemed him expendable and sent him off in search of a new job in a shrinking news-scape.

Journalists cope, better than most, with the chronic instability of their industry because they are blessed—or infected—with a fierce streak of independence. When reporters in the movies—say, Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, or Darren McGavin in the Night Stalker/Night Strangler series—are depicted wrangling with their editors and risking unemployment, they are art imitating reality. John Voelcker is comfortable as a free-lancer nowadays because he answers to no boss and chooses his own assignments.
He can get away with this independent because of a third quality common to the real pros in real journalism, an intellectual eclecticism that serves reporters as a survival strategy and an energy source. Most people choose a career and make a living by settling into a specialty in which they become experts. They don’t need—and most don’t strive—to seek out knowledge beyond the demands of the job.

Journalism, however, is a job in which learning is not a choice. It’s a mandate.

Even in trade journalism, like the automotive press whose members were a majority at the House of Journalists, there’s a range of knowledge and interest that punishes specialization. The transition from mechanical vehicles to “computers on wheels” has driven an entire generation of “gearheads” from the auto beat. The survivors are quick studies who could adapt, learn and explain how LiDARs, radars, sensors, MCUs and SOCs have altered forever the very nature of “mobility.”

Voelcker is typical example of this chameleon intellect. He “learned how to be a journalist” early in his career as an associate editor at Spectrum, the venerable journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In his next assignment, he forsook those technological roots for jobs in New York at a publication focused on interior decoration, American Home Style. A few stops later, Voelcker was the first managing editor of This Old House, a magazine, inspired by the popular WGBH television series. After another twist in his career, working for the Green Car Report, he had the gearhead thrill of riding in the third Tesla ever built—before the company fell into the clutches of Elon Musk.

Set loose nowadays, Voelcker writes articles for Car and Driver, Wired and other outlets within but not necessarily exclusive to the automotive media.

His favorite car, ever? A 1991 wagonback Isuzu Impulse, designed by Italdesign’s Giorgetto Giugiaro, with posi-track suspension and a chassis designed by Lotus engineers—an esoteric vehicle only a self-described “car nerd” could love.

Typical also of the gang at the House of Journalists is what Coleridge would call a “permanent suspension of belief.” Unlike their influencer competition, the reporters brought together by Scott Fosgard were politely skeptical of every company who made presentations at the House of Journalists.

The phrase that came to my mind was “annoyingly curious.” Inevitably—even if a free meal was imminent and the journalists were restlessly hungry—every presentation, by companies that included Gentex, MicroVision, McKinsey and Clarios, ran overtime. Presenters were not only showered with questions, they were often interrupted in mid-speech. Several times, Fosgard had to intervene and beat back questions with a whip and a chair, so that the speaker could finish the slide show, perorate and gird his or her loins for the third degree.

This tendency among veteran reporters to keep asking and pressing is so deep-seated that it can defy the very purpose of journalism, which is to seek that which is new—the news. For example, Fosgard arranged for the House of Journalists a press conference with an executive from Lucid, a Chinese electric car manufacturer, at the Fontainebleau Hotel.

Note that this was the rare CES confab in which a corporate spokesperson actually had to confer with media. The standard CES “press conference” is an extravaganza in an auditorium with several hundred (or thousand) seats. The stage is peopled with corporate executives and C-list celebrities who are marched out in a fanfare of heavy-metal violin music before a backdrop of Technicolor video clips twenty feet high and twenty yards wide. Absent any dialog with the press, the “conference” is actually a cavalcade of product rollouts. Among those I’ve witnessed were Carly Fiorna doing calisthenics, doglike robots performing backflips and wagging their, um … posterior antennae, and an “autonomous” sedan able to navigate the stage without anyone in the driver’s seat or the need—proclaimed loudly by a Bert Parks clone—for a driver’s seat at all.

Back at the Fontainebleau, Lucid, a company evidently unschooled in dog-and-pony protocol, had failed to rent a conference room at the vast hotel. So, Lucid’s House of Journalists press conference took place in an empty hallway, without chairs. The spokesman, whose named escaped me because I was too far away, offered his two dozen listeners no information that exceeded the boilerplate copy usually issued in a press release. There was no news. Everyone—standing in the hallway, leaning on the wall or, finally, sitting on the floor—was uncomfortable. We all wanted to end this waste of time.

But instinct prevailed. These were reporters. Reporters ask questions, even when they’re in pain. So, the spokesman and his weary audience had to stick it out for almost an hour as the weary audience asked the questions they could not help but ask, which elicited answers that enlightened none of them.

Thankfully, this meeting was an exception. Virtually every other House of Journalists gathering was inquisitive, substantive and—when sufficiently prodded and probed—occasionally newsy.

This posed a contrast to the increasingly influencer-driven coverage at CES that was stark and troublesome. John McElroy expressed his misgivings to me over coffee at a media room in the Las Vegas Convention Center.

He noted that the twenty-four-hour news cycle driven by the emergence of the internet has devolved into a cycle more like twenty-four minutes. Vloggers, podcasters and paid shills feel compelled to constantly post “something new, as much as possible, as fast as possible, as often as possible,” with no concern for accuracy, background, corroboration or fact.

“Views,” said McElroy, “are not news.”

I asked him to peer into the future of his profession. He rang a note of cautious optimism. Responsible news outlets—he cited the New York Times, Bloomberg and other “legacy” sources—can stem the tide of disinformation and propaganda,“as long as those outlets can be profitable.”

He admitted that this is a tall order. “We are not figuring out how to digest this,” said McElroy. “We have not yet established a way to help the public tell the difference between bullshit and information that’s well-researched and accurate.”

My own optimism, as cautious as McElroy’s, was boosted, at least for the moment, by spending five days among a crew of bonafide newshounds assembled by Scott Fosgard in a basement—with a bowling alley and a pool table—in Sin City.