Senior writer for Automotive News retires

Brad Wernle, a senior writer for Crain’s publication Automotive News, is retiring after 32 years with the company.

Wernle writes, “Thirty-two years ago today, I walked in the door at Crain Communications as a newly hired reporter for a startup publication called Crain’s Detroit Business. Today, my 32nd anniversary, is also my last day working for the company that has given me so many opportunities. I am retiring to move on to new adventures.

“In parting I’d like to recall some past adventures, thank a few people and offer an observation or two.

“My Automotive News career began with a journalistic disaster. Strictly speaking, I became an Automotive News reporter one November day in 1994 when I boarded a creaky Air Ukraine Tupolev Tu-154 jet in Kiev, Ukraine, bound for the industrial city of Zaporizhia in the south of the country, one of the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union.

“I had come to Ukraine on my last assignment for Crain’s Detroit Business, a sibling publication of Automotive News, where I had worked for 10 years. I spent a month in the gorgeous old Habsburg city of Lviv, Ukraine, teaching a class in journalism and communications at the Lviv Institute of Management, a fledgling business school. I wrote a series of stories for Crain’s Detroit about Ukraine’s efforts to move from communism to a market economy.”

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