When Randi Payton started the magazine African Americans on Wheels in July 1995, he simply wanted to educate and inform black consumers about the automotive industry.
A funny thing happened to Payton's magazine on its way to an impressive 600,000 circulation: The semi-glossy quarterly has become a conduit for the auto industry, informing Detroit, Europe and Asia about the aspirations of African Americans, who rarely see themselves as the focus of national marketing or sales efforts.
Since that beginning, the magazine has told industry figures about the intense interest among blacks in motor sports, chronicled the historic, largely unknown contributions of blacks to the automotive industry since its infancy and looked at how much auto makers have embraced diversity in the work force.
"There's another culture," Payton, the editor in chief, said in a recent interview from his office in Washington, D.C. "And because we are the only magazine targeting it, everybody is coming to us as an authority on this market."
African Americans on Wheels' authority extends nationally via a network of 32 black newspapers, mostly in major metropolitan markets--in Los Angeles, the magazine is distributed with the L.A. Watts Times. In addition, zoned editions of the Detroit Free Press and Washington Post targeting ZIP Codes that are 60% to 70% black carry the magazine.
Through these papers, Payton said, African Americans on Wheels reaches a total audited circulation of 600,000.
"It's a good fit for us," said Alan Miller of Chrysler Corp.'s diversity public relations office in Detroit. "We do advertise in it. It's circulated in major urban areas where we have key markets."
"It is one of the ways we reach out to the black community," said Lonnie Ross, manager of marketing for special markets for Ford Division public affairs. "It is the only [specialty magazine] that targets the black community."
When the magazine premiered in print, it also appeared on the Internet and had a "big e-mail response," Payton said.
It has "a beautiful site with solid content," says the Car Connection, an Internet magazine that bills itself as the World Wide Web's automotive authority. African Americans on Wheels can be found online at http://www.automag.com.
