A very special year from an editorial perspective
Two more days and 2020 will be history, but unfortunately not the pandemic. It has turned many lives upside down and the very fact that we are now talking about a "new normal" shows how deeply this virus has penetrated our perception.
It's no wonder that everyday editorial life was different in 2020. Until the end of February 2020, it was business as usual. Three major trade fairs - Bremen, Paris and Stuttgart - could still be held almost as in other years, while Retro Classics narrowly avoided a lockdown. After that, we were soon inundated with cancellations and postponements. We tried to keep up with the constant date changes and invented the corona ticker. Soon we were no longer able to report on events, and even the Geneva Motor Show was simply canceled shortly before it was due to open. Promised advertising orders were stopped, at first not even photo shoots with cars could be realized. Everything was canceled. The world (almost) stood still. When we got back to it, this allowed us to take some very special photos. After all, when can you photograph a Porsche on a practically empty highway ?
Now, like so many others, we could have simply carried on on the back burner. But we decided otherwise. We went full throttle in the truest sense of the word. From March 2020, all of us working from home, we invented a new car connoisseur quiz every week . Instead of reporting on visits to events, we dug deep into the archives and came across cars and their stories that had long since been forgotten but were still worth retelling. We expanded our reporting instead of reducing it. If the more than 1,100 articles/contributions that we published online in 2020 were to be printed in magazine form, the result would be almost 6,000 pages, and that would be pure payload. In addition, experience has shown that there would be at least another 4000 pages of other content (e.g. advertising, table of contents, classified ads, calendar, etc.), which, according to Adam Riese, would have resulted in 40 to 60 fat classic/youngtimer magazines. But we could also publish a ten-volume review of 2020, which would take up almost an entire shelf on the bookshelf. Of course, we're not doing that, we've sorted out a few stories and summarized a few more, and together with a good handful of new stories, we've produced our tried-and-tested annual magazine .
In the summer, we were able to take part in a few (masked) events again and, after some initial overcaution, we were also able to carry out extensive photo productions with cars again. Most of it has already been published on zwischengas.com, but a few contributions are still waiting to be completed.
While the corona situation darkened again towards the fall, we planned our 10th anniversary and worked on the redesign of our website at the same time. In the end, we were able to celebrate the redesigned online presence at the same time as our 10th birthday. And for this big moment, we prepared a very special report that juxtaposed three red cars from three eras. This was also a very special day for us, because even for experienced editors, this comparison of the Fiat Balilla, Jaguar E-Type and Ferrari Testarossa was highly interesting , especially when you were allowed to sit behind the wheel of these three classics.
From November 23, 2020 to today was only a good five weeks away, but of course we didn't let up and then presented the highlight of this year's reporting on Christmas Day, the article about an almost forgotten Mercedes-Benz collection. This was more complicated than it might have seemed. Our photographer visited the clean-up work several times, observing the "archaeologists" as they pulled out, cleaned and loaded the vehicles. The story began back in September 2020, when we were made aware of this interesting find. An exciting photo production was created, which was completed just in time for the festive season.
Thanks to the difficult-to-understand processes in the social network and the good reportage, our servers began to groan under the strain of the many readers between December 25 and 28, 2020. We had never experienced anything like this before. In fact, well over 150,000 readers devoured this report within days.
What a way to end the year! But the year is not quite over yet. Maybe there's still time ...
