From the editor: What our 2 mid-year reports will examine

A little inside baseball for a moment, if you don’t mind.

At Cherokee Media Group, we’ve got two reports coming up that essentially serve as mid-year retrospectives, albeit in two different forms.

One is the July issue of Auto Remarketing, which will provide a “Mid-Year Report” on the retail, wholesale, finance, repossession/collections and buy-here, pay-here segments on the used-car market.

The other is our updated, summer edition of “The State of the Used Car Industry” whitepaper, a semiannual report we began last year.

So, what’s the difference between the two?

Well, you might watch “SportsCenter” to catch the scores or highlights from the night before, then settle in for “Outside the Lines” or “30 for 30” for more in-depth, trend-focused storytelling.

Or, you might watch the evening news broadcast for a recap of the day’s events, but catch “60 Minutes” or “Face the Nation” for a deeper look beyond the headlines.

Not that we’d compare ourselves to those pillars of broadcast journalism (not even close), but we’re aiming to take a similar approach in terms of how we distinguish those reports from each other.

The former will be data-focused and provide you the numbers: How many used-car sales have there been this year? Where have used-car prices moved? What do the auto finance numbers look like? And so on.

The latter will be trends-focused and go beyond the numbers. More storytelling. Specifically, the whitepaper will dive into how digitization continues to change the operations of the retail and wholesale segments of the used-car business, while also examining  the legal and legislative developments from recent months that have implications for the auto finance and collections spaces.

Stay tuned to Cherokee Media Group enewsletters and eblasts for more information.