One of the big buff mag boys over at the House of Trend is showing some remorse over the Motor Trend empire's embargo-breaking for fun and profit. Mark Williams, chief truck-lover over at Truck Trend, is manning up to "accidentally" publishing their latest issue ten days early and revealing the new Hummer H3T a week and a half early (though curiously forgetting to apologize to Suzuki over the new Suzuki Equator embargo blunder). Mark says "...it looks like we were the ones who screwed up the whole thing...and no doubt the subject of a few heated conversations at General Motors..."
Curiously, Mark forgets his magazine landed not only in subscribers hands, but also on newsstands ten days early. But his warm and folksy explanation for it (something about two people giving it to two people who gave it to two people who had nothing to do with two people buying it at newsstands on diametrically opposite sides of the country) leaves us feeling like he's just a simple country boy who doesn't understand the series of tubes that are the interwebs. But that lack-of-understanding falls as flat as his attempt to pivot Truck Trend into the populist position of "little guy" to the blogosphere's "big boys" (Dude, you're a magazine — printed on paper with ink. Your tagline is "The Pickup and SUV Authority" and we bet you've got an office with a desk and a door and a real chair! Have we mentioned how much our backs hurt?).
But we'll not quibble with such trivial details. Instead, we're just happy we've been officially vindicated as the "embargo breakers" of automotive media. But one thing's certain for us after reading Mark's commentary — this buff mag addiction to embargoes is in dire need of a 12-step program. Luckily, Motor Trend has a long-haired leader with more journalistic integrity in his little finger than we've got in our entire bodies. We're sure he'll be the first to man up and make a call to action for his magazine going cold turkey. Remember, the first step is admitting you have a problem. In fact, we're already refreshing Motor Trend's blog, anxiously awaiting an opus from Angus Mackenzie following in lock-step with our arguments we've already made on the embargo issue and the anti-embargo comments made by AutoWeek's Dutch Mandel. Yup, any minute now — click, click, click, click... [Truck Trend]