What can you expect to find at Speedmonkey, and why?
Speedmonkey was created by me, Matt, and I write 90% of the content. My co-reviewer of cars is Colin who also contributes Colin's Garage articles as part of the Speedmonkey Fleet occasional series.
A few other writers send me their work, mainly motoring journalism students who then go and get real, paid jobs at real, paid websites and magazines. The most recent was Graham King who sent lots of quality stuff and then got hired by www.onlymotors.com as its web editor. (Well done, Graham!)
Mike Armstrong currently sends articles which are much more technically competent than my own writing but the bad news is he's looking for a journalism job too, and he'll probably get one.
But otherwise Speedmonkey is just me. I write it in my spare time and don't take an income. As such what I write has to be fun for me, as well as the 4,000 people who visit the site every day. I put a new article up every working day and try and keep it as fresh and interesting as possible.
What I've largely stopped doing is writing about new cars based on the many press releases that hit my inbox every day, unless they really interest me and potentially the readers.
I don't have the time nor inclination to reproduce a press release. As you may have noticed the content on the site nowadays is a mixture of blogs (rants, opinions) and car reviews with the odd piece of super-mega-massively interesting news thrown in.
There is a place for info about new cars in the Speedmonkey world and that is on the Facebook page because then I don't have to think about how to reword it in an interesting way. I simply comment briefly, copy/paste the press release and add some photos.
If I was chasing more hits on the site I wouldn't do this, but as I work full time and don't need income from Speedmonkey I'm happy for the Facebook page to get some more hits at the expense of the website.
If you've ideas, comments or an article you have or want to write for the site then please get in touch.
At the end of the day I just like cars and bikes and enjoy writing about them, and so does Colin. We do it for the fun of it. Nothing more. Without that element we wouldn't do it
Cheers
Matt Hubbard
p.s. A huge thank you to all the car companies who let Colin and I drive their cars. Without these car loans and the odd day on track we wouldn't have 50% of our content.