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?

Yas Marina Circuit CEO Richard Cregan

Here’s the good news: circuit owners have finally realised that they need to work a lot harder to provide fans with a worthwhile experience. And the bad? Inevitably, some of them see it as a means of squeezing your wallets harder.

Speaking at the Motor Sport Business Forum in Monaco, Nürburgring CEO Walter Kafitz told delegates:

“Circuits are part of the entertainment business, not just part of the sports business. Unlike in, say, football, people stay at a circuit all day – or all weekend. We have to keep them entertained. If you add value then you can demand more for the ticket.”

Bearing in mind that he was speaking in his second language, we shouldn’t read too strident a meaning into the use of that word ‘demand’. But only this week, the joy of many UK-based fans at the announcement from Silverstone turned to dismay when they contemplated the outrageous price of tickets. To get a family through the gates will cost hundreds of pounds.

It doesn’t have to be this way. For the model of a family friendly circuit, look to Abu Dhabi. The stakeholders in the grand prix – chiefly Aldar, the construction company, and Mubadala, the sovereign wealth fund (which also owns a stake in Ferrari) – planned the new circuit as a family entertainment venue that would offer a rich experience over the whole weekend. They did this because they knew they were bringing the sport to an audience that was entirely unfamiliar with F1.

Thus they built grandstands with a fairly conservative capacity, but specified that they could be easily expanded in future. They invested in educating their staff and their families about Formula 1. They invested in proper transport links, and built shopping malls and other attractions in the local area. The entire project was underpinned by knowledge of and respect for their demographic.

The upshot was a successful event that sold out easily and generated excellent feedback in a survey of public attendees and F1 workers. Compare and contrast with the soul-sucking grimness of other circuits that have been thrown together in the middle of nowhere and left to rot. I remember being at the Turkish GP in 2008 and quipping during the drivers’ parade that it would be quicker to introduce the crowd to the drivers rather than the other way around.

Richard Cregan, CEO of the Yas Marina circuit, said:

It’s about entertainment. It’s all about families, about giving every individual a positive experience – not just at the circuit but in the city itself. I don’t believe that you will have customer loyalty unless you go beyond the event. We’re lucky in that we’re working with organisations like ADTA [Abu Dhabi Tourist Authority] and Mubadala, who are helping to create that environment.

Silverstone appears to be in safe hands; Populous, the architectural consultancy charged with altering the circuit, also transformed the Millennium Dome into the O2. John Rhodes, a senior associate at Populous, described how they transformed the unloved white elephant on the Greenwich peninsula into a successful entertainment venue.

Initially we were looking to get about a million people a year to come to the O2. At the moment it’s about six million. The essence is that people go there to the event but then hang around afterwards. You have to create a destination that will encourage people to spend time there, regardless of whether there is a motorsport activity going on.

Maybe so – but someone’s got to pay for it. And it may as well be you, clearly…

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.

We see the whole environment as providing an opportunity. We’ve been involved in Formula 1 for some time as friends for some people, but never thought about getting more heavily involved than that. The situation is such right now that it provides an opportunity for new teams and new investors – it’s not a time of uncertainty but a time of change.

Times of change usually provide an entry point. We believe there is a chance to enter the sport and build a platform that sort of has to reinvent itself. If we were to become part of F1 we could be part of that reinvention.

If we were to do a deal, we would still be basing ourselves as a constructors’ team. That’s a different kind of business from a start-up. For us, what would be important is to provide stability over time. The business opportunities in F1 lie very rarely in making money out of your team; they should lie in making money out of the business platform that you have.

Put any seasoned executive into F1 and they turn into a big kid, essentially. It makes them much more approachable. So for us, F1 is an excellent business-to-business platform.

The teams can bring the sport closer to the audience. The sport and its environment is going to be forced to change.

Most of the broadcast contracts are based on a way of looking at things from 15, 20, 25 years ago. The fact is that in three or fours years’ time, most people in a lot of countries will be watching it not on TV as we know it today, but over the internet. And that completely redefines how you negotiate contracts and how you distribute content.

You can’t control the internet audience in the same way as you can control the television audience. It’s a similar process to what the music industry has gone through in terms of digitising itself. You have to figure out new ways of making money out of it, because at the end of the day that’s what keeps the sport alive.

Neville Wheeler, the director of the Cisco Media Solutions Group, talked about sports media being at a “point of disruption” which would provide opportunities.

We’ve invested heavily in helping media organisations, and especially sports companies who invest vast amounts of money on content rights, to look at different ways of being able to monetise those rights. Primarily that’s through digital media. For a long time there’s been a trend towards having bigger, better web properties with more monthly uniques than your competitors. But we’re seeing a change – from prioritising high volumes to seeing value for your audience as increasingly important.

As we all know, motorsport has a global audience, and we’ve got to a point now where you can have any content any time, anywhere in the world on any device. We’re trying to help media companies realise the full potential of the rights they’re paying a lot of money for; to do this they need to move away from focusing on how many people they can bring to their sites – and start finding new ways to engage with their audience, to find out interesting things about them. Personalisation of content and advertising, providing unique behind-the-scenes experiences – from that value you can create a revenue stream and a sustainable vision of business.

This year there are blue skies and an inspirational-looking array of speakers. The only bum note was sounded by a PR agency boss I spoke to last week; he said he wasn’t coming, on the grounds that although last year’s forum was interesting, he didn’t actually generate any business from attending.

But there is always someone – or something – worth listening to at the Motor Sport Business Forum. Last year we had the spectacle of a bullish Simon Gillet unveiling his daring and highly improbable plans for the British Grand Prix at Donington, including the radical notion of closing down East Midlands Airport for the weekend to act as a massive park and ride scheme. It subsequently transpired that no such proposal had  been put the airport’s way – and that even if it had, the answer would have been, “Absolutely no. And who are you, anyway?”

What a difference a year makes. Or not, as the case may be. I was clearing some old files off my digital recorder last week and came across Max Mosley’s keynote speech from the 2008 Motor Sport Business Forum. Listening back to his opening remarks put the events of the past 12 months in chilling context:

The fundamental issue that confronts everybody is the world economic situation. From motorsport’s point of view, the difficulty is that nobody knows whether it’s going to get worse, or whether we’ve now seen the worst of it and it’s going to get better. The economists certainly don’t know, and the old joke about two economists and three opinions is absolutely the case today because nobody really knows what’s going on. It’s quite an alarming situation.

I think, as far as motorsport is concerned – or at least our area of it, which is international motorsport – it’s essential to plan for the worst case, and to have contingency plans in place which will deal with the situation if it does get much worse.

I think we have to face the fact that Honda pulled out because of falling car sales. And there’s no guarantee that the falling car sales, which affect all manufacturers, won’t fall further; and if they do, we’ve got to reckon with other manufacturers pulling out, not only in Formula 1 but other parts of motorsport. We have to plan for that contingency.

With that having been said, because we don’t know what’s going to happen it would be tedious of me to go in great detail through the various contingency plans we have in place. Suffice to say, they exist.

Mosley uttered these words against the backdrop of an economic climate that had taken an abrupt turn for the worse during October. The news of Honda’s withdrawal from F1 was still fresh; and although the other car manufacturers were banding together as FOTA to increase their powers of collective bargaining, no one could be certain whether others were preparing to follow Honda out of the door. TV news broadcasts at the time were padded out with helicopter shots of quaysides and rented runways filled with unsold cars.

Mosley has his knockers (although I’m sure they’ve all been paid for) but it’s clear that his single-minded attack on costs – and his determination to allow new teams in – was the correct course of action, even though it made for some rancour. Those who set themselves against it proved only that they were absurdly out of touch with reality. Many of them, incidentally, are now looking for alternative employment.

That said, I’ve been surprised at how out-of-the-loop some of the team principals have been. Easily done if you’re part of the private jet set, I suppose. You only have to look back at some of the public pronouncements made by the likes of Mario Theissen and John Howett to see how the principal of a manufacturer team can carry on swanning around the paddock like a master of the universe – even while the board is cutting the rope.

Nick Fry was the first team principal to feel the blast of the recession and he is one of the speakers at the Forum. His story of prospering against the odds will set the tone for what promises to be an interesting couple of days. Alex Tai of Virgin F1 will also be present, as will Talal al Zain of the Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company, which has a stake in McLaren. The keynote address will be given by Lotus F1 owner and Twitter aficionado Tony Fernandes. Very often it’s these kind of people – the ones who hold the purse strings – who are far more important than those who simply strut and preen for the cameras.

We’ll also hear from representatives of major sponsors including LG, Shell, Diageo and Hilton. Companies such as these are the engines of motor racing, whether their involvement is partly technical or purely commercial. They don’t go racing for fun, and in the present economic climate their spend has to meet very strict ROI criteria. It’ll be interesting to see how keen they (and their competitors) are to spend, and through what channels they intend to direct that investment. Although conventional ad spends remain in decline, to the detriment of many newsstand magazines, brand activation is as important as ever.

Thanks to the web, Formula 1 fans can now baste themselves in news on a daily basis. A panel of well-known F1 scribes including Jonathan Noble of AUTOSPORT, Alan Baldwin of Reuters and grandprix.com’s Joe Saward will discuss the triumphs and challenges of breaking news in the internet age. Journalist, broadcaster and prominent F1 blogger James Allen will chair proceedings.

Stay tuned…

Still, the new-look South Terminal now has a Pret, so you can cushion the awfulness of budget travel with the comforting stodge that is the all-day breakfast sandwich. The chief weakness of this giant among comestibles is also its greatest strength: it’s almost impossible to eat with any decorum, which ensures that your neighbours (who may be serial dingbats, and I’ve found it’s better to err on the side of caution in these encounters) avoid looking at you, let alone try to make conversation.

The reality of life as a freelancer is a gruelling slog of these crack-of-dawn flights, so you have to evolve coping strategies. Other people are clearly at this game, too. I saw a guy this morning trying to read a collection of Philip Larkin poems as the morass of humanity swarmed around him en route to WH Smith. I imagined him navigating past the give-us-20-quid-and-you-might-win-a-Porsche stand: “Bog off,” he’ll have told the ticket tout, “I want to read An Arundel Tomb before my gate opens. ‘How soon succeeding eyes begin to look, not read…’”

I’ve never quite worked out which is the worst out of EasyJet and Ryanair, so, as the gaudy aluminium tube progressed slowly from the gate to the runway, I tried to plot this dilemma in the form of a Venn diagram. You could probably do something similar on a spreadsheet using the principles of double-entry book keeping.

As we reached cruising altitude I deployed the behemoth. True to form, the elderly couple on my left clocked the bacon, egg and tomato ooze and pretended to be asleep. This turned out to be a very good thing, because the man was one of those people who is compelled to provide a running commentary.

“That must be the gate we’re going to go to,” he told his wife just after we landed (at which point, since all my fillings were in place, I decided that perhaps EasyJet is the better airline). “There’s the man waving his little sticks. Look! There he is! You can see through the window as the plane turns round! There he is! Waving his little sticks!”

I preferred him when he was snoring.

Thence to the bus, because €70 for a cab is plain barmy. Hearing my car crash French, the lady at the ticket counter merely boggled at me, as if I were Inspector Crabtree out of ‘Allo ‘Allo. Luckily I ended up in Monaco rather than Montreaux – although, sadly, not quite the right bit of Monaco.

Anyway, I’m here now, in a cheapoid self-catering apartment that’s costing only £10 more for the entire stay than the conference hotel is charging for a single night. I think I’d better nip out and explore the lay of the land: although the apartments looked very close on the map when I booked, I’d somehow forgotten that Monaco is built on the side of a cliff…

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!

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…

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.