Formula 1 and other stuff

Looking ahead to the media discussion at this week’s Motor Sport Business Forum in Monaco…

I’ve written elsewhere that magazines and newspapers, referred to sniffingly by web pioneers as ‘old media’, aim to give the readers what they want – or rather, what they think their readers want. This is a tricky task because it relies on a voodoo triangulation: intuition, previous copy sales, and reader feedback in the form of ‘letters’ – shonky barometers, all.

Let’s concentrate on reader feedback for now. People who write letters to newspapers and magazines are, almost without fail, unspeakably angry about matters that just don’t warrant fury of such magnitude. For instance, there is a man in the UK who, when he takes exception to an article in a motorsport periodical, will demonstrate his anger in a scarily methodical and obsessive fashion.

He will compose a suitably damning missive, leaving a space (or spaces) demarcated by a box (or boxes), into which he will glue the pieces of the offending article, which he has carefully cut out with scissors. To give added emphasis to crucial points there will be a smattering of highlighter pen. And, rather than write one long epistle covering every article that has attracted his ire, he will produce individual letters for each – and post them in separate envelopes, often on the same day.

So you can see why many ‘old media’ types became convinced that their readers were potty – simply because most ordinary folk didn’t see the point of spending the price of a stamp on a few words of assent or debate.

The comment facility has made journalists more accountable than ever before to the people who actually matter: the readers

Now that all you have to do is type your name and email address into a form, you no longer have to be insanely angry to make the effort to get in touch. Yes, mouth-breathers occasionally arrive amid a fanfare of bilious, point-missing verbal abuse, but for the most part (often thanks to careful moderation), comment areas are civilised places.

The comment facility has made journalists more accountable than ever before to the people who actually matter: the readers. It’s enabled a vast sector of the demographic – what might have been called a silent majority – to be heard and to connect with one another, and to make their reasoned voices heard above those of the cranks. In the background, though, is another element of reader power that threatens to be more pernicious.

The array of metrics available online has taken much of the guesswork out of content creation. Where the creators of a newspaper or magazine have to rely on experience and intuition (safe in the knowledge, for instance, that putting an unknown or unloved F1 driver on the cover of a motorsport title equates to death on the newsstands), online publishers see precisely how many times a story has been read, and how the readers reached it – via the front page of the site, drawn in by the design and headline, or from elsewhere via links or a search engine. In turn, they can see which key search words yielded the traffic.

If content is pushed to you, pre-shaped towards your existing preferences, could it be that ultimately it converges into a dull, unchallenging dirge?

It’ll come as no surprise to you that newsrooms now march to a beat more familiar on sites such as Amazon: Customers Who Shopped For This Also Bought. If a story brings a spike in traffic, the call will come from management: “More of that, please.” And it’s not just the big organisations. A couple of years ago, Lewis Hamilton regularly came in for kickings from bloggers who didn’t much care for him – and very much cared for the influx of readers from Spain who were keen to hear that Brits hated Lewis, too. This gravy train disappeared into the tunnel of tedium long before the bloggers exhausted their reserves of spittle, but readers from Arteixo to Alicante couldn’t get enough of it.

If content is pushed to you, pre-shaped towards your existing preferences, could it be that ultimately it converges into a dull, unchallenging dirge? Is the proliferation of channels gradually educating us that we need not listen to anything or anyone with a contrasting view? Are we heading into the domain of www.blah-blah-blah-I’m-not-listening-to-you.com? Does customisation stifle diversity? Are we going to be force-fed the good stuff, like foie gras geese?

I’m partial to a glass of Madeira but I wouldn’t want to share the fate of the Duke of Clarence.

Since most of us prefer to access content without paying, lurking behind this cheerful free-for-all is a host of people intent on getting their hands into our pockets by other means. I’ve never been on an SEO copywriting course, but I know people who have, and I’ve read the materials that accompany some commercial SEO copywriting courses. In amongst logical advice, such as on headline writing, there is guidance that to my eyes crosses the boundary between editorial and advertising: “How to add emotional triggers that increase the desire to buy,” and “steps for turning features into sales-generating benefits” are just a couple.

I earn the bulk of my living from commercial writing, so it would be disingenuous of me to claim that advertorials are bad. But it’s very important that advertorial copy is clearly signposted as such. At the moment there are many sites that aren’t as transparent as they could be about what they’re telling their readers, and why. And it’s often the self-styled ‘little guys’ who are being much naughtier…

On the second day of next week’s Motor Sport Business Forum we’re going to set down our cappuccinos and canapés long enough to listen to a panel on the media. It’ll feature some of the most authoritative people writing about Formula 1 in the English language.

Media people talking about the media? It sounds painfully self-indulgent, and elements of it probably will be. But the flow of information from source to audience affects us all; and the media industry is undergoing a colossal realignment that has already started to change the way we consume Formula 1.

We’ll hear from Jonathan Noble of AUTOSPORT (apologies for shouting, but as an occasional contributor I should probably remain ‘on brand’), Joe Saward of grandprix.com, former ITV commentator and pre-eminent F1 blogger James Allen, and Ian Burrows, the commercial director of F1 Racing. It’s a big subject so I’ll leave the editorial aspects for separate posts and talk about the commerce-driven structural changes – for good or ill – in this one.

Had you noticed we’re in a recession? Mercy me, so we are. Actually, though, the media industry has been in an ersatz recession for a decade; it’s just that the rest of the world has caught up all of a sudden, tipping the industry properly over the edge.

The media industry has been in an ersatz recession for a decade; it’s just that the rest of the world has caught up all of a sudden

At the tail end of the 1990s the publishing world went wild over the world wide web. In a mediaverse where a blackberry was still just one of the ingredients of Vimto, directors and proprietors who had only just become aware of the ‘inter-net’ stubbed out their cigars and decreed that their companies must immediately have an all-singing, all-dancing ‘web-site’.

The later they woke up, the more money they spent. Even after the dotcom bust in March 2000, one newspaper group (the one whose former proprietor helped himself to the pension fund and then fell off his yacht) went on a hiring spree in which it recruited an entire online editorial team to operate in parallel with the print title. Within a year it had realised its folly and was forced to lay the majority of them off, at substantial expense.

Thus, the quandary: to keep in step with their competitors and to retain control of their brands, publishers had to stay on the net. But online revenues weren’t big enough to pay staff the going rate. The result has been an insanely self-destructive process in which the print titles (which make money) subsidise their online equivalents (which don’t), all the while reinforcing the customers’ expectation that content is and ought to be free. Meanwhile, paper costs have been creeping up, forcing cover prices to rise and accelerating the desertion of readers to online sources.

On the basis of “If you build it, they will come,” publishers have spent the past decade chasing online traffic numbers in the hope that someone will find a way of making money out of the internet before people stop buying newsprint entirely. Perhaps it would arrive in the form of some great Victorian machine, hissing and steaming and farting out alchemical chunks of gold. The inventor could go on Dragons’ Den and even Deborah Meaden would invest.

Perhaps it would arrive in the form of some great Victorian machine, hissing and steaming and farting out alchemical chunks of gold. The inventor could go on Dragons’ Den and even Deborah Meaden would invest

Anyway, this much-anticipated device never arrived. And now that the rest of the world is in recession, the downturn in ad revenues has forced publishers to cut budgets, because the print titles can no longer subsidise their online siblings. Those cuts manifest themselves in many different ways: from sending fewer reporters to events overseas to having fewer reporters on staff in the first place, and reducing the number of ‘back room’ personnel (both permanent and freelance) who police the quality control. Some newspapers have unified print and online teams and even expect writers to make their own copy fit on the page. You only have to look at the stylistic dog’s dinner that is the Telegraph to see this is a bad thing.

Sub editors can be querulous and annoying people who enjoy nothing better than to halt work for a 10-minute debate about whether the term ‘motorsport’ should be one word or two. But for all their foibles, they perform a useful function. A good sub can save a writer from minor illiteracies, self indulgence and outright egg-on-face anfactualities; sadly, bad ones can introduce wrongness to otherwise fine copy, which is why many writers are hanging out the bunting to celebrate the impending death of this profession.

Champions of new media will tell you that reader interaction has made this strand of quality control obsolete. The theory goes that if what you write is inaccurate or untrue, your readers will call you out on it. And that’s true – up to a point. But why should your customers have to correct your mistakes, or point out that what you’ve served up is essentially cant, piffle and tosh?

Why should your customers have to correct your mistakes, or point out that what you’ve served up is essentially cant, piffle and tosh?

In this downsized world of digital dark satanic mills, fewer permanent reporters will be travelling to grands prix (I’ll examine the implications of this for the depth, accuracy and honesty of F1 coverage in a separate post). The British press has been spared a major cull over the past year or two thanks to the popularity of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, but this is an expensive sport to cover. When the interest of the mass audience in F1 dwindles, the axe will swing.

Those who remain will have to be more entrepreneurial – if they’re freelance – or work for companies that are exploring new ways to tap into the marketing budgets of companies involved in F1. It’ll be interesting to hear from James, who has obtained Tag Heuer sponsorship for his site and self-published a 2009 yearbook in collaboration with F1’s greatest photographer, Darren Heath.

Joe has a different approach, hedging his bets somewhat: a blog with Google ads and a sort of virtual ‘tip box’; a site with conventional ads; and a paid-for e-zine. He’s happy to admit that none of these individually makes a mint, but in combination they enable him to carry on reporting from the front line.

Next up, I’ll explore how greater reader interaction is driving the flow of content. And, speaking of reader interaction, it’s comments time. Which sites do you value most? What kind of ads do you find intrusive? Do you respond to web ads or do you use blocking software? Also, if you have any questions for the delegates at the Forum, I’ll try to put them across.