Has anyone heard anything about Dominion Enterprises launching their own AUTO search portal? AutoFind.com was a property of the old Trader Publishing company that was left to the wayside for a long, long time. Now all of a sudden, they have begun beta-testing.
Go to www.autofind.com
I know that they probably had an agreement about competing with AutoTrader.com, at the split, but why would they suddenly need to launch a new site if they already had GetAuto.com running, hosting Dealer Specialities listing? Now obviously, it looks like the listings are just feeding from Dealer Specialties much like GetAuto.com, but it seems suspicious that they are developing another site, behind the scenes... Anyone have any insight on this?

Hey Dennis-
Where are you located?

Where does Dominion fit into all of this - are you guys still delivering their mags?

Here in Motown I havent heard any word about them getting rid of us. This week came the news that Tradin Times has been cancelled-not even printed this past week and that the Muscle Car trader will be cancelled as of this coming week (first week in feb) Other then that though, they gave us new contracts, so I'm guessing they intend to keep us around for at least a short (maybe a month or two?) while longer-interesting to note is that on the contracts it states that a new one is to be issued every April 1st, so maybe they are just waiting till then..although again, like was mentioned, without even reading it fully I'm SURE the contract is teflon, one can only hope that they skimped a little on costs there though too and missed something..but I kinda doubt it. As for killing off the ic's completely, here in motown it could be done if they got a contract with a company called suburban magazine delivery-but I would think that would be more expensive (much more) then having it done by us IC's. An interesting thing that i noticed as well was that this week the auto trader was published without a glossy cover as the previous weeks had been. Also our circulation center hours were cut a bit as well, and judging by the mood of the one person running it in the afternoon and from reading on here I wouldnt be surprised if more cuts are on the horizon. Also, again to confirm what was said on here-Auto trader is now private seller only, though with the customer service issues reported on here I doubt that will last long as well. Hope this helps.... Thanks for all the info

Was at the store yesterday and saw the first books out without the dealer ads. WOW, what a joke. Ours were were probably 25% the size they used to be. Bet they only needed 1 pallet for those on the truck.

If auto trader, truck trader and other trader publications are still being printed and put on racks how are they going to accomplish this with getting rid of all of us I C's

Dennis, what city are you in? Is their not a print option for Autos?

Look at your contracts. They are to give us 30 days written notice. They gave me notice over the phone and also told us they needed to keep us working for the 4 weeks but they are only giving us 3 weeks. They had a transition period where we did not get paid for 1 week so they say we are getting a 2 week check 1 week for the transition period we did not get plus the week they held back when you started and then the final week we delivered for a total of 3 weeks. Please go over your contract and then reply I did calll a Attorney on this.

Will there be value in the autotrader/automart.com web sites? How can there be when all of these print customers are being pushed into them. It seems to me that the web packages are going to get awful expensive, the sites are going to be overloaded and you will have to have the lowest price inventory to win. I just don't see this as a sustainable business model without print support. COMMENTS????

our small independent dealership started day 1 with auto mart,very affordable at the time and good results,1 year later the small dealers were squeezed out and all the big boys started to use the magizine,and the price for a full page over night went from 200 to 425 a week we could no longer afford this,so we stopped using it,we and several dozen independents/up comes auto deals (same office) lower quality of ink/paper cheap knock off not even in a magizine form some weeks you were blurry some you were okay,but a lot more affordable, they never pused much for there step child paper even if it had a good following they would shoot pic,10 day before the mag. would come out ,we would have 30 to 40 % of our cars sold before the ad finally caught up to the day it came out on the stands,here is the thing,you stopped caring about your customers (the dealer) I WAS tired of hearing how comming out on a tues.or wed. didnt work for you,well that was when most dealers in our area would pick up new inventory! so we could put fresh (10 day old) inventory into your magizine and look like we were turning product.YES we did get calls from your auto deals,we are a small mom and pop and we have spent consistantly 2800.00 a month for 8 year solid/on 4 of their magazines,and their web site,each year prices go up and quality/service/and what you pay for went down,but the calls that were generated were great,even if they sold out the dealers,and the customers,NOTE THIS THEY HAD A MONOPOLY ON THE AUTO MAG.FORE EVER,COX OWNS THEM ALL! ANY ONE OUT THERE BESIDES COX STARTING UP A NEW DEALER PUBLICATION I HAVE 2800 A MONTH IN MY BUDGET AND AT LEAST 2 DOZEN DEALER FRIENDS WE ARE WILLING TO GIVE YOU A GO!!

I worked for Automart for 2 years and got out by the skin of my teeth in July thank God. I started to see the writing on the wall when they mergerd the Automart and Autotrader sales forces in my city with no clear cut plan for how the merger was actually going to work. Unfortunately Automart magazine was a great publication that that was bought out and then shut down due to greed. And they kept the .coms which sucked

Don, you are most likely out of luck here. As an I/C you are not entitled to much because you are not an employee. As an I/C you are in business for yourself, and (were) providing services to a comnpany that essentially just went out of business. there is no recourse there and even though you are supposed to get a thirty day notice for any change made to the contract, I will bet that going out of business is a mitigating circumstance that does not apply in your case either.
As an I/C, you cannot even claim unemployment, here again, because you are not an employee.
It's unfortunate, but it is what it is. If you review your signed contract very carefully, you will see that the company has protected itself very well. It's like teflon, nothing will stick.
As far as pay being witheld, it does not make sense. Check your pay schedule; some cities were paying the same week as a delivery, some were paying a week behind, and some even paid 2 weeks behind. Sorry for the bad news, and good luck to you as you are now in the same situation as everyone else that provided service to this company.

I found out that we are not getting any severance pay what can be done about this and they are also shorting us one week of pay.

I am offering consultation and services for startup magazines in Texas. We can provide design, layout, printing, and distribution services. We have a printing and publishing division with three locations in Texas which have non heat web and sheet fed presses.

I have an extensive background in print and advertising with 9 years at Trader Publishing. You can look up the details at linkedin.

Contact: robert.nusbaum (@) persidea.com

I am delivering in Northwest Indiana. All Cox trader publicatons will end you will be delivering nothing but 3rd party . Auto trader, truck trader,commercial& heavy equipment, rv trader, boat cycle &rv trader, classic car, chevy and corvette trader, ford and mustang trader, also aero,yaght,milstone series and racing ( All monthly and weekly cox publications) is what they told us

Its supposedly just auto extra and auto mart. Although in our market we also have a classified publication that is supposed to be going away. My guess would be anything that is NOT auto or truck trader is going away.

Can anyone list all the publications that cox eliminated? Title by Title of publications - I have been getting conflicting reports.

Oh yea, just looked, guess its a min of 2 weeks pay. So we hired a couple of people who were there maybe 2-3 months. Guess they got 2 weeks as well. Does not seem fair.

Firing: Who is DP and TB?

it is pretty quiet abot the DP guy and his sidkick TB. One of you know the details about this

The severance packages are supposed to be 1 week for every year. I was with the company for 8 years, but only got 7 weeks, go figure. Not only that, but my weekly pay is going to be LESS than what I was making. This is because its based on the last 12 months average pay. I made quite a bit less in 08 than before because last year my management position was eliminated and I was moved to a much lesser paying job. I have also heard that managers get 2 weeks for every year. I have not been able to verify that yet. So, once again I got screwed because I didnt get 2 weeks considering I used to be a manager, I just got 1. AS far as contractors, I cant see where there would be any severance there. Those guys are out of luck. What area is this that Don Carlson is talking about them not delivering the books anymore?

Former independent contractor: I am totaly ticked off at this outfit. I have been with them close to 3 years. They say they are continuing to print auto trader and truck trader but cut out our jobs of delivering them to the stores? Is our severance pay 2 weeks more than our check or what? Please help me out with a answer. Thanks

They say there's a generous severance package, but I don't think 2 weeks is anything! One rep only worked with us 3 months and she got 2 weeks. I was there 2 yrs. and I got 2 weeks!
2 weeks is NOT generous.

I heard the company was pretty serious about the letter mentioned by "Cox Employee No Longer" and fired a couple people including that guy DP mentioned before. I wonder if they'll fight their unemployment, too.

Hi, I'm Shaun Smith, the Assistant Publisher for Auto Round-Up Publications, Inc. We just learned of the unwarming news. We are a 35-year old company that publishes 3 classic car and truck titles nationwide. We are always looking for sales reps and we treat our team members with respect, and in return, we have loyalty, in fact, our core group has nearly 150 years of total experience! It sounds like some of you are having a rough time and we would like to extend our deepest concerns and will be thinking of you. If anyone is interested in contacting me, here is my contact information:
info@auto-roundup.com or phone 304-884-7641, ext. 7# (I prefer email).

Fly on the wall, you hit the nail on the head. I was in private party all except the last year of my 8 years. The last year I was first in circulation then in commercial sales. Our city used to be the call center, if you want to call it that, for our region of 5 other cities. That was right before the big split. After the split and cox took over, when our csr's quit, we could not hire anybody to replace them. Then pretty soon we started rolling overflow calls to orlando. In the mean time, the prices started going up to the point I guess they were trying to do away with the RTS ads. When customers would get Orlando, things would get screwed up big time. Pretty soon, we were no longer taking any calls and everything was going to Orlando totally. Right about this same time last year, our last 2 employee in private party besides the managers and supervisors were let go all the sudden one day. Both had been with the company close to 15 years. One was one of the CSR's, the other was our front counter person. My postion was also eliminated and that is whey I was moved to circulation. Anyway, after that, all they would get coming into the office was mad people who had their ad screwed up on the phone. It just got worse and worse. It was like they were trying to run us out of business (which turns out they were I guess). Right before thanksgiving when the completely closed private party across the country, our last remaining employee up there of 30+ years was let go. Everyone else in the office was assured that this would be the end of the layoffs and everything will be fine. See how that turned out.

As far as the books coming back to certain markets, the auto and truck trader are not going away at all. They are still going to be printed (for now) except only with private party content. With all the mad customers, and no dealer ads, the books will be mighty small.