F1 fans are a passionate bunch, and as a journalist it’s very hard to write anything about anyone without being accused of bias; especially when we indulge our penchant for hyperbole, as we do. I found during my time on customer magazines that sometimes a client will focus on something that catches their attention – something they don’t like – and it plays merry hell with their ability to judge the rest of the product. In this case, it’s James’s second line that has caused many readers to chafe:

Jenson Button won the race with a performance of measured perfection and instinctive tactical brilliance, while Lewis Hamilton lit up Albert Park with his audacious passing, but ended up looking diminished in comparison with Button, less in control of his destiny, less mature.

It’s part of the folly of sportswriters that we occasionally overcook our opening paragraphs. While we’re in confessional mode, I’ll admit to describing Jenson’s early pit call as “inspired” in my post-race wrap on Formula Santander. But was it inspired or merely an act of desperation?

When analysing any tactical move, many people fall into the trap of judging it in the context of data that has subsequently come to light. But you have to come to it as if it’s a fresh page: on that particular lap Jenson didn’t have access to the split times of his car and those surrounding him, or to video images or still pictures showing how much he was losing or gaining. He was merely a man with a decade of Formula 1 experience, sitting in an F1 car – a harsh, stressful and vibratory environment – feeling a lack of balance in his tyres, seeing his team-mate pass him and pull away, and probably feeling rather than seeing the car behind him closing up. What, then, to do?

The choice was to KBO (“Keep Buggering On,” as Winston Churchill put it) in the hope that the tyres would improve, or roll the dice there and then by fitting a new set. It was a snap decision made in the heat of the moment, not a considered analysis based on all the facts. Don’t forget that when he announced over the radio that he was coming in, his pit crew were still sitting around picking their noses.

Had the decision not paid off we would now be describing it as foolish and inept. But Jenson’s call worked out, so in the flowery phraseology of sports writers it becomes “inspired” rather than “potty”. That’s how history is written. We remember Alexander Fleming, who lucked into the discovery of penicillin because he couldn’t be bothered to do the washing up, but we forget what’s-his-name* who spent years slaving over a means of mass-producing it.

What was the exact proportion of luck involved in Jenson’s win? Impossible to say. People on F1 forums like everything to be neat, clearly defined, black and white; sorry, ladies and gents, but sometimes inspiration and desperation run into one another down a dark alley and end up doing something their mothers wouldn’t want to see. Journalistic bias doesn’t come into it…

*Howard Florey

 No doubt, though, there’ll be some forum noise to the tune of “another journo sells out…” Hardly!

 As well as being a positive move for him this is also good news for Renault. Bradley knows the value of reaching out to the fans and public, as evinced by his work on the team’s website during his previous sojourn at Renault. Now that the comms team is free from the need to carry Flavio Briatore’s luggage, things will only get better…

Having said that, the sight of Michael Schumacher on a hot lap cannot fail to stir the soul of any F1 fan with a pulse. I for one am looking forward to borrowing a tabard and standing as close as I can get during the final phase of qualifying.

But some of the reportage of today’s Mercedes Grand Prix launch provided a brutal reminder of what I’m not looking forward to this year: the bulldog that is the British media sinking its teeth into Michael’s leg and refusing to yield until he admits to his past crimes.

When the Fleet Street posse are on a mission it is often a marvellous thing to behold, like watching a pod of dolphins herd their prospective lunch into a conveniently tight ball. At Monaco in 2006 they dealt Schumacher a succession of wounding strikes as he tried to brazen his way through a post-qualifying inquest into his disgraceful professional foul. At Monza last year they set about bullying Fernando Alonso into divulging what he knew about ‘crash-gate’ (just as they were getting somewhere, though, some berk from Gazzetta dello Sport let him off the hook).

On a slow news weekend, though, when they’re desperately trying to grind out the story du jour, it’s enough to drive you to drink. They declared open season on Schumacher today and drew a tart riposte.

How much mileage is left in this clunker of a story? Michael Schumacher is a known quantity. We’ve got 19 grand prix weekends to get through in 2010 and some of them are bound to be a bit slow on the news front. If the default tactic in such circumstances is going to be Schumacher-goading, then unless he’s actually caught with his hand in the till I don’t want to know. There’s only so much ennui a man can take.

There’s been a lot to take in: hours of recorded speech which will take a few weeks to sift through. It’s been a fascinating couple of days – although when the lady from Porsche dropped the word “emotionalisation” into the mix, mid-way through a marathon session of death-by-powerpoint, I was briefly gripped by the urge to throw something. Apart from that, and a couple of changes to the line-up that had been circulated before the event, it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Part of the reason for coming was to take the pulse of the motorsport economy, and hopefully not reprise the Groucho Marx gag, “Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.”

So how is the patient? Certainly not suffering hallucinations. There was little of the gaga optimism that was epitomised last year by Donington’s Simon Gillet, although the otherwise eminently sensible Tony Fernandes was a little premature in talking about getting to the front of the grid. You have to be a bit crazy to do what he’s attempting, but at least he has a solid and successful track record in business, and he doesn’t change the subject when you ask where the money’s coming from. He is one of those scruffy millionaire types that demonstrates their abilities with the cut of their jib rather than the cut of their suit.

There is a clear division on the subject of new media: the panellists on the first day took what I’d call a more progressive view, talking about how there was no point in trying to charge the public for content they can find for free, and challenging the notion that having a high number of unique visitors was a worthwhile metric. If I were to level a criticism at this view, it’s that the people who subscribe to it are still somewhat unclear as to how to ‘monetise’ it.

Ah, dread word! Rather like ‘decimate’, this uncomfortable-sounding verb is undergoing a transition through popular misuse. Technically it means to convert debt into currency; in the hands of internet proponents it describes the process by which they try to rifle your wallet while you browse.

I digress. On the second day we were firmly in the territory of the numbers merchants, as delegates from World Superbikes, World Touring Cars and MotoGP bludgeoned us with data, including how many millions of unique visitors they had on their websites. The bad mojo had clearly leaked into the computer system, which would sporadically refuse to change slides when they clicked the remote.

The common ground between these camps is that they are still scratching around for a way of establishing a revenue stream. Most websites still don’t make money, and even the ones that do are not generating enough. Expect to see, over the coming year, more ‘free’ widgets and games that are driven by data capture. Once they know your email address, how old you are, and what you’re interested in, that data becomes a saleable commodity. When entrepreneurs talk about ‘personalisation’, this is what they mean.

It’s becoming clear to the business community that having high traffic volumes doesn’t equate to profit. That may not come as news to many of you, but don’t forget that the internet is still like the Wild West to many people in business. For many of them, their only interaction with the industry is when they decide to revamp their website(s) and invite tenders from web design companies, only to be deluged by flim-flam. They must feel like the bemused punter in that Not The Nine O’Clock News hi-fi shop sketch.

My colleague and patron Ian Burrows nailed this during the media panel yesterday:

YouTube and Twitter have millions of users but they don’t make any money – although some people are using Twitter to create revenue, Twitter itself isn’t bringing anything in.

This may change over the coming months. The much-derided new retweet system is clearly designed as an enabler for e-commerce (or, to put it another way, a means of enabling people you’ve never met to pop up and try to sell you something).

The WRC is embarking upon a big project to engage viewers over the internet. This is laudable and I hope it demonstrates the virtues of openness, but we’ve got to face facts: as a championship it has nothing to lose by giving its offering away, because that offering is worth a fraction of F1’s value. As an example of the relative magnitude of the F1 audience, around 90 per cent of the monthly page impressions on Autosport.com are for F1 news; the next largest sector is MotoGP… at five per cent.

We are told that there are web developments afoot in Princes Gate, but don’t expect to see the wholesale liberalisation of TV footage – or a plethora of interactive feeds – just yet. Bernie is wary of investing huge sums in new technology after the debacle of his interactive TV service, which cost megabucks to set up and run (the digital TV compound and the equipment in it took up most of a 747). The only way to justify it was to put it on a pay TV platform and charge a premium. It was a flop then and it will flop if they try it again – unless the premium is a sensible one.

Uh oh. An elderly American couple has sat at the next table and are giving a running commentary on the people coming through the security gate. This is hell. Must dash.

Alan summed up the changes he’s seen:

When I joined Reuters the culture was that you didn’t have your name on a story. Now my email address is at the bottom of every one. People can contact me through that, and I Twitter as well. The fence that surrounds the paddock isn’t a barrier any more. The media doesn’t have a monopoly on the flow of information.

But within the paddock there’s still too much emphasis on old media, of magazines and newspapers. The teams have a very old-fashioned view of servicing the media and tend to concentrate on the newspapers first.

This has to change. Paper sales are in decline. Are the revenues from digital media going to be sufficient to send reporters to events when the content they produce is so easily appropriated by people who are just sitting at home with their trousers around their ankles? In the future, perhaps. AUTOSPORT moved to a ‘freemium’ model on its site in 2006 because it realised that there was no point in trying to guard the news. Ian explained the reasoning:

News is a devalued asset. Man wins race. Anybody can write that. You have to provide extra value. When we made news free we only lost about five per cent of our subscribers. We’re now delivering over 20 million pages a month to subscribers, and 70 per cent of our audience is outside the UK.

Jonny Noble acknowledged that while it’s impossible to police the bedroom clippers, journalists working for reputable sites have to guard their own brand:

We made a policy decision to not respond to rumours, because otherwise we’d be spending all day every day chasing up rebuttals – whether Massa is going to Williams, or whatever. We aim to get it right rather than being first. It takes months to mend a reputation. You have to do your job and maintain the quality – maintain the trust.

I had a bit of a swipe the other day at the ‘editor’ of a minor F1 news site, who opined on his own forum that he didn’t have to go to an event to write a story about it. Alan Baldwin had a similar take:

You really do have to be there. A lot of the outsiders convince themselves that they don’t. But if you’re in the paddock you get a sense of when people are starting a rumour just to see how far it goes, or if there is an agenda behind it. If you’re not there you can’t nail it. I don’t see how you can write truthfully about what you haven’t seen.

Yesterday’s story about media rights, and Bernie’s “out of my cold, dead hands” approach to them, generated a lot of responses. I still believe that there should be greater access for the people who want it (and that there are people out there who will find what they want, somehow or other). But Ian Burrows summed up the problem with rushing to liberalise the TV rights:

Broadcasting fees make up 40 per cent of Formula 1’s income, and abandoning that model in search of advertisers who may or may not be out there is bloody dangerous.

Perhaps we shouldn’t rush to fix something that hasn’t broken yet…

Mercedes GP CEO Nick Fry (Drew Gibson/LAT)

Nick Fry is always good for a soundbite, so it was no surprise that after his eagerly awaited appearance at the Motor Sport Business Forum in Monaco he was beseiged by the hunter-gatherers of the fourth estate.

From where I was sitting it was an alarming scene. One second he was there, the next he’d disappeared in the ruck. So here’s the evidence that he’s still alive – although if Dieter Rencken (top left) was about to tell one of his jokes, maybe not for long…

Manufacturers, teams and drivers have to be more consistent about their involvement. Sponsors must continue to activate their support. And motorsport must realise it is in hard competition with other sports.

All parties must realise that they have to stop badmouthing the sport. Yes, it’s part of the game, all this talk of double diffusers and handicap weights, but in no other sport do people systematically complain about the rules and systematically threaten to quit the sport. In no other sport to players pull out, publicly and loudly, to join other series.

It is my gut feeling after 17 years in sport broadcasting that we have reached a critical point. How can fans engage, how can television invest long-term, if motorsport people badmouth, complain about, or even turn their back on the sport because they haven’t got what they want from the organiser.

That shook us from our torpor.

Eurosport broadcasts Formula 1 and MotoGP in some territories, and its events subsidiary promotes the Intercontinental Rally Challenge and the World Touring Car Championship. The WTCC has been wracked by internal strife this year; SEAT has publicly chafed about a handicap measure introduced to limit the potential of its turbodiesels, and BMW has been complaining about weight penalties almost since the series began.

We have to avoid professional myopia. Motorsport is an entertainment form in competition with other sports. We have to be careful that football doesn’t take it all.

Some non-automotive advertisers are hard to convince to embrace the motorsport environment, for reasons I mentioned earlier, but also because some think motorsport needs a green revolution. If this trend continues, monetising motorsport will become difficult – and most motorsports will end up on special interest channels rather than the strong TV stations they’re on at the moment.

Was that a dig at Motors TV?

Given what was said earlier about the broadcast rights being based on a model that’s at least 15 years old, do you think that Formula 1’s rights holder is holding back the sport by clinging on to this outdated model?

I fully expected an epidemic of fence-sitting, but the responses were very interesting. Neville Wheeler of Cisco said:

The pace of change in the internet in general is so fast that unless you’re prepared to break away from the shackles of the old way of doing things, you’re rapidly left behind. You will very quickly find that the people who are passionate fans will seek out and access the content in one way or another.

The smart organisations are trying to find a way of monetising those rights, rather than trying to create a walled garden to protect them as long as possible. We have to get to a point where the audience immersion, social media and associated technologies are a key component of the way motorsport – and sport in general – is delivered to the global audience.

I like the ‘walled garden’ analogy. It speaks to everyone who has tried to access a territory-locked live feed or put up a montage of racing footage on YouTube. FOM has a marketing department of 12 and half of them must be lawyers; one probably even has ‘YouTube Grinch’ in his or her job title.

Gérard Lopez from Mangrove Capital Partners said:

To most people, the so-called MTV generation is the modern generation. To us it’s not – it’s old-fashioned. People don’t buy music any more. Kids don’t watch television as much as they used to. People consume media in a different way. Even some video game platforms are being forced out of the market by on-line gaming. Rights holders have to touch their audiences differently.

It doesn’t make sense to try to charge people for something that they will figure out how to get for free. F1 will be available on the internet and you need to be prepared for that. The challenge is not in deciding what you give away for free but in deciding what sort of value you’re going to provide on top of that – elements that people are actually willing to pay for.

New Lotus F1 boss Tony Fernandes said:

I came from the music business. I left that business because it didn’t want to embrace the internet. I told them [Time Warner] that if they didn’t embrace it, the music industry would be destroyed. They were more concerned with EBEYDL – Earnings Before Everything You Don’t Like – calling it ‘cashflow’. I quit that day.

Social media is a fantastic way of reaching an audience and keeping them excited on a day-to-day basis. There’s a massive opportunity. But whatever you do, it has to be accessible and reasonably priced. There’s a fantastic app for the iPhone that keeps you informed about timings on a race weekend, but it’s pricey. I think F1 has to look at that.

Everyone I’ve spoken to has been enormously impressed by Tony Fernandes. He seems to be exactly the kind of driven, entrepreneurial, forward-thinking businessman F1 needs, and not a flim-flam man or a Walter Mitty type.

The next panel was about sponsor value, and one or two of the representatives echoed the sentiment that FOM needs to take a more proactive approach to marketing the sport – but more about that in a separate post.

Advocates of free market economics and devotees of Adam Smith (there’s a big overlap; maybe I should draw a Venn diagram) still believe that consumers act in a rational way. Unless you’ve spent the past couple of years living in a loft, catching up on the entire series of Heimat, you’ll know this is utter cobblers.

You don’t have to rub yourself down three times a day with a copy of Blog Your Way To A Six-Figure Income to know that if you don’t update your site regularly, your traffic will fall off more dramatically than Richard Chamberlain in The Towering Inferno. And that indicates there’s a big distortion in this ‘ere market; even in the niche that is Formula 1, people want to read news every day. And if the sites they visit first don’t have any news? Well, they’ll carry on looking until they find one that does.

Where there is demand a supply surely follows, with the result that an entire industry has grown up to provide these addicts with a daily fix of not-necessarily-news; usually some quote-based bilge usually bearing no relation to what was originally said or meant. The big fish among these bottom-feeders is the rightly derided GMM, a sloppy outfit which never lets the facts get in the way of a non-story, and which only began to acknowledge the sources it was plagiarising when those sources threatened to get legally medieval.

But he isn’t the only person out there pretending to be something he’s not

GMM’s main ‘journalist’ is Andrew Maitland, an individual who has never entered the F1 paddock and probably never will, owing to the queue of people waiting to give him a thorough kicking if he ever does. But he isn’t the only person out there pretending to be something he’s not. Anyone with a computer and the merest modicum of literary ability can now pass themselves off as an F1 journalist, and there’s a lot of them at it.

On the outer reaches of the spiral arm of the F1 news galaxy there lurks a particular brand of goon. Often they have day jobs, but by night they dress up and play at being journalists, merrily cutting and pasting information from elsewhere, usually adding next to knack-all to it. The mere fact that someone else has carried the story renders it fit to print without further interrogation.

A month or so ago m’learned colleague Joe Saward indulged in a little schadenfreude at the expense of a minor F1 news site, which was complaining that its contents had been pilfered. He called the piece Thieving from the thieves and had a good giggle at the irony because the site in question carried a GMM feed.

What he didn’t expect was the vehement response of some of the forum-dwellers there: the proprietor posted several rather miffed comments on Joe’s blog in which he made a series of bafflingly illogical claims, including that he knew GMM’s output was dirge but spared his readers the worst of it, and that while he would dearly love to be a full-time F1 journalist, he just couldn’t afford the ‘luxury’ of all that travel. His chums, meanwhile, accused Joe of being a meanie without ever actually getting to grips with the point, and then they all went back to their forum, where they could deconstruct Joe’s personality in more detail without fear of moderation.

It was like watching an old Norse raiding party trash a neighbouring village – set the livestock loose, burn down a couple of huts – before returning to camp and congratulating themselves on a pillage well done. The proprietor opined that there was no need to attend events anyway, since he had recently composed a perfectly adequate news story about the Brawn-Mercedes deal using just two press releases. Surely, I thought, he should be aspiring to do a better, more thorough job than this?

F1 fans find the ‘echo chamber’ effect just as vexing as the professionals do – because many of these fans blog about F1 and rely on an accurate information to make their efforts worthwhile

Elsewhere on the web, a site has recently come into being called Formula 1 Blogger. It is cleanly designed and optimised for smartphones, and its creator (full-time job: web developer at Sony Computer Entertainment) Twitters its every update and Diggs assiduously under the peculiar pseudonym of ‘Mootymoots’. The content, though, is the same old tosh, regurgitated without any analysis, insight or comment, and very briefly at that. Every post reads like it took half a minute to write. You kind of wonder what the point is.

Now, my great-great-grandfather was a blacksmith in a little village called Catford, now part of the suburban sprawl of south east London. History doesn’t record his response to the invention of the motor car, but he was probably rather miffed to watch his livelihood disappear down the swanee. In the same way, many old-school F1 journalists are having to cope with the inevitable disappearance of many of their revenue streams, particularly syndication deals. But they cannot stand in the way of progress.

Times change. We just need to make sure they change for the better. The comments in response to the earlier pieces in this series show that many F1 fans find the ‘echo chamber’ effect just as vexing as the professionals do – because many of these fans blog about F1 and rely on an accurate information to make their efforts worthwhile. There are plenty of blogs out there which have readable, well-crafted and compelling content, regardless of how many F1 races the authors (or their visitors) have attended. You don’t have to work in the F1 paddock to talk or blog about the news; but at the same time we need to be cautious about those who are pretending to be something they’re not, because ultimately they are doing their readers a disservice.

You can demand better…

To establish long-term credibility, new media has to adopt some of the better practices of the old (and before some of you start stamping your feet, yes, I know that old media doesn’t necessarily follow all of these rules all of the time). Transparency, accuracy, fairness, attribution, inquisitiveness – it may take a little more time and effort, but it will make the product better.

There is no way of enshrining this in law. Hard-working, hard-bitten journalists like Joe Saward can huff and puff all they like about having their work stolen, but ultimately change will only come through the demand side rather than the supply side. The cut-and-paste genie is out of the bottle. Servers the world over are groaning beneath the weight of all the jibber-jabber.

But you, the readers, have power. You can demand better. If a blog or news site is dealing in regurgitated slop, tell them. Leave a polite comment, pointing out that their stories have been rehashed from elsewhere without proper attribution, interrogation or verification. Let it go up there for other readers to see. And if the moderators remove it, or respond with a Pitpass-style “You’re not paying for any of this, so bog off elsewhere,” then reward their churlishness by doing just that. There are plenty of elsewheres to bog off to and nicer people to converse with.

Hurrah for the internet!