On May 29th, 2014, Honda Tuning magazine officially closed its doors and forever changed the landscape of our Honda enthusiasts community…
I don’t think any of us will ever really fully grasp the gravity of this situation until years later, when we look back at what might be the golden age of our community. Even as I type this, I am still struggling with the idea that I will never get an assignment from HT again. Sure, there were strenuous times when deadlines were short and there was much to do, but it was a good kind of stress. It was the kind of stress that reminds you that you’re doing something important, you know? I never let anyone know that it was on my mind this weekend but during the quiet times, it weighed heavily on my mind. So much so that what you’re reading now was typed-out by me on my phone because I just felt like these thoughts had to be documented…
My journey with Honda Tuning magazine started, ironically, on May 29th, 2007. Things were very different back then. There was no Stickydiljoe.com and I was just a guy in his 20’s who had just quit his 5-year job at an auto parts store where I was hating life as an assistant manager. 2007 was a big year for me. I grew up in San Diego and just decided one day that I had outgrown the city. I needed more from life. I made the decision to move up to Los Angeles and was just hanging out with friends that I knew up here. One day, I was perusing NWP4LIFE.com where I saw a post from a guy (who shall remain nameless), that had just been promoted to the head editor position at Honda Tuning. He said he wanted to take the magazine in a new direction and was looking for suggestions from fellow enthusiasts as to how to make the magazine better. I had some interest in doing some work for Honda Tuning so I decided to email him and ask if he needed another writer. Back in ’07, I didn’t even know how to use a camera so photography was not in my scope. I just wanted to write some stories that could possibly help me pay some bills. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life at that point but magazines had always been interesting to me. The editor asked me to send in a writing sample and so I sat in front of a computer all night and wrote a piece for him to check out. He made some suggestions after he looked it over and then he said that he liked my work and wanted to bring me on…. I was stoked. HT was a magazine that was one of my favorites and also a publication that had previously featured my own Honda build a year before. Being able to work for them was a life-changing experience…
As quickly as the opportunity came, it went just as quickly…
A couple weeks after the editor had hired me on, he went and did something ridiculous and got himself fired. I won’t elaborate because it isn’t important to the overall story but let’s just say that he said something to someone that he shouldn’t have and got himself fired. Along with that firing went my hiring, because at that point, no one else had known that he had brought me on to HT. I was bummed. The only other person that I knew had been working for Honda Tuning then was my good friend Matt “Rodrez” Rodriguez. Rodrez had been working for HT for years so I let him know what had happened. Someone from another publication stepped in to take over in the interim and Rodrez passed along the info that I was supposed to get work from HT. It was a long shot but the new editor decided to give me a chance. 7 years and 4 head editors later, I was still an integral part of Honda Tuning….
Eventually, Rodrez took over the reigns as the head editor of Honda Tuning and the magazine was as great as it ever was. These last couple years have been incredible with him at the helm and I’m proud to say that I was a part of the experience. Outside of work Rodrez and I became great friends and there was never anything he could ask of me that was too much. If he needed a story or shoot to get knocked out in a short amount of time, I was the guy to turn to. I could knock out a feature story in less than 24 hours time and within the three magazines that I wrote for, I was the guy to go to if you needed something done immediately. We would go to events or even throw events where we needed shoots done the following day. We were tired, beat up, and worn out but we made it happen. Rodrez poured his heart and soul into Honda Tuning and I always respected his passion. The fact that Honda Tuning magazine shut down is not a result of his efforts. The magazine always did well, exceeded expectations, and the advertising numbers were higher than anyone ever expected. HT died because of a simple business restructuring. It was a swift move that had very little to do with the people involved. As the saying goes, “It’s just business”. But business can’t take 100% of the blame because it should have never been a decision that had to be made. Collectively, the support for print from the enthusiasts just wasn’t there with all the titles. First came Turbo magazine, Sport Compact car, then Modified magazine, and now, great titles like HT and Import Tuner. We who worked there were almost foolish and naive enough to think that Honda Tuning was safe during the transition. There was a moment when I wanted to believe that we had at least the rest of the year to prove ourselves but that was certainly not the case…
Unless you were there with us during those late nights when we had a story to finish or photos to edit that we spent hours shooting, you’ll never understand how much work went into this magazine. A little bit of us died the day we realized that HT was over…
Our generation grew up reading magazines. For enthusiasts like myself, I became a “car guy” because of print magazines. I didn’t have any family members or anything that were into cars that introduced me to it. My love of imports came from a random issue of Turbo magazine that was being passed around my classroom among friends when I was a sophomore in high school. After seeing these cars and how they were put together, I was hooked. I joined the automotive publication industry years later remembering that magazines were an important part of shaping how we as a community came to be. We drew inspiration from magazines and saw things that we never thought could be possible when it came to modifying a vehicle. The internet is this generations’ form of inspiration but we should never forget where we came from. That is why print is and will always be important. I’m not gonna be able to pull something I found off the internet 10 years later and remember every single thing about it because people don’t save the stories that they see online, they just save the photos. The stories are what matters and telling a story was my job. For the Honda community, my job was to tell you about the people behind the Honda builds that you only saw in passing online and seven years to the day when I wrote my first story for print, I fucking lost my job. It was because of HT that I was able to make the leap over to Super Street and eventually Import Tuner and that foundation is now gone. I can’t sit here and tell you to read all about guys like Ejay Adriano who built his car as a tribute to his grand parents after he was shot and nearly died because people stopped caring about the story. The internet has trained us to be careless and only think for the moment. Everyone thinks that the moment someone gives you any measure of spotlight on the internet that it automatically constitutes it being a “feature”. Let me tell you this; no feature will ever be as good as a print feature that you can hold in your hands. You’re not gonna sit here and tell me that 10 years later, you’re going to be able to show your kids what you did by showing them a print-out of some shit you found online. That is why print will always be important and will never be triumphed by something as fleeting as digital media….
We need print. From a business standpoint, you could say otherwise, but as enthusiasts, car magazines were/are every bit as important as the people who shape our community. We drew so much inspiration from what we saw in magazines like Honda Tuning and Import Tuner and now a huge chunk of that is gone. For me, print is a part of my every day livelihood and I honestly don’t even know how much it will affect me until months later. There has been an outpouring of support since the news came to pass that HT and IT are gone but the fact of the matter is, we (as enthusiasts) failed. We’ve been reminded to “support print” for the last couple of years but it apparently just became more of a saying that ultimately didn’t generate enough action. The Honda community took a huge hit last week that I don’t think it will ever recover from. Many of these guys were building their cars with high hopes that one day, they might get a shot at being considered for HT and now that dream is gone. Everyone needs some form of inspiration and something to strive for but that has been taken away from them. It’s scary to think that the only form of motivation and desire to build a Honda now, besides your friends of course, will come from the internet. The same place that floods our social media feed with fight videos, girls throwing shovels at each other, and an endless stream of memes that are created because people no longer have the ability to express how they feel with a correct sentence. This is also the same internet that tries to enforce the idea that trends are the only way to build cars and how everyone is entitled to an opinion, no matter how unfounded or incredibly stupid it is….
What I loved about Honda Tuning and how Rodrez ran the magazine is how uncompromising it was in showcasing only the highest caliber of builds. I guess you can say now that it was uncompromising to a fault. Never did you see any of that wannabe rat rod, sticker-bombed bullshit that floods the internet these days. “Stance” was never a word in Honda Tuning’s vocabulary and Rodrez made every attempt to only showcase the builds that would withstand the test of time. While other magazines had to conform to the current status quo to meet sales figures, Honda Tuning stood proud in its efforts to be above any passing fad….
So what’s next? Well, it’s really hard to say. Both HT and Import Tuner were absorbed into the Super Street brand, which is now my main source of income. SS will become a bigger book with a larger variety of content because of all this and I hope you guys continue to support print. Super Street is all we have left now. Things are changing at a rapid rate but without your support, it might only be a matter of time when we have to say good bye to print as a whole. We all try to reinforce the idea that we need to “support print”, but it is all just words unless we actually go out and make a conscious effort to put action into that idea. Without it, there might not even by a Stickydiljoe.com anymore because working in this industry has allowed me the freedom to maintain this site without asking for much in return from anyone.
I’ll surely miss the paycheck and the workflow I got from Honda Tuning but what I will miss most about the magazine is what it stood for; QUALITY. That’s photo quality, story quality, and the quality of men that participated in making it one of the greatest publications that we as Honda enthusiasts will ever hold in our hands…
As someone who was an avid reader of HT, who still went and purchased copies of it even though I was working for the magazine itself, I’d like to thank Rodrez and all who made the magazine what it was…
As someone who did work for Honda Tuning for seven years, through the ups and down, I’d like to thank everyone who supported the magazine and appreciated the work we put into it monthly. It was an incredible experience and a large part of my life that I will not soon forget. Thank you to all who I met and the relationships that have formed because of our efforts in HT…
Hindsight being 20/20, Honda Tuning deserved a better end than this. There was no goodbye, no swan song, it was just “business as usual”….
We should have done a better job in supporting HT, as well as Import Tuner, when it was around…
We, as enthusiasts, failed.
-Joey Lee, contributor for Honda Tuning (2007-2014)