Race reporting today... Yuk!

Just a way to get you interested..

Back in the bad old days before television, a motorsports reporter made notes during practice, talked to the drivers, made notes of the race action and collected race results from the clerk of the course. Many of them also took photos of the participants, practice, and the race.

They then went back to their hotel rooms and wrote those wonderful reports on portable typewriters using all the fingers at their disposal, usually one or two for each hand, stick it in the post the next morning and move on.

In most cases they also processed and printed their film. Of course, the races were held with a couple of weeks between them.

Today, a motorsports reporter sits in front of his/her laptop in a room watching a TV screen. Their view of whatever race it might be, is controlled by what the TV director puts on the screen. Luckily they do not provide the audio feed.

The reporter normally does not go and stand at a corner at a road race. It's too far from the TV! They are provided lap-by-lap reports and at the end of the race, the top three are brought to the press room or the press go to the interview room and listen to someone ask whitebread questions and hang on every utterance.

They may get the fourth place finisher. But that's it.

Some of the older types like me will still go out and visit or get information. We also interview selected participants.

I know that you can read three reports from the same race and think that the reporters were not at the race.

Comments?

Gil

One of the main reasons I stopped buying Autosport after 40 years was the change in the way they report Grand Prix races.

I definitely do not wish to knock Nigel Roebuck who I think is a first-class scribe, but rather the way things are set out nowadays.

Decades ago, the story of the race was written as just that - a story. Although correspondents did not write down every single incident (e.g. Ginther was passed by Brabham etc etc) they did not miss many and the whole thing was a thourough, chronological review of the event.

They even printed the race positions, with times, at regular intervals throughout the report.

Nowadays, if you want to see what sort of race Alonso had, you will find about 4 lines under a picture of his helmet.

I suppose it's simply that we have moved into an age of instant information and no-one is expected to be prepared to sit and read through pages of text. Oh Jenks, where are you............

Unfortunately for us old guys, publishers today are motivated not by enthusiasm for the sport, but by the great god Mammon. Directing magazines to the soundbite generation is not only a lot easier than old-fashioned reporting, it also sells more copies. It is this dumbing down over the years which has led me to survive quite happily without the publications which in my youth I could not live without.
Present-day reporters aren't to be blamed for this - they don't have the same access to trackside or to drivers as their predecessors.
It is for the same reason that I long ago stopped paying any attention to published chassis-numbers in GP reports. They are not gathered by knowledgeable reporters, but by press-releases from the teams.

As David mentioned, the problem is many-faceted and driven by forces that simply are probably beyond that of a mere Scribe. However, I echo the thoughts and have pretty much stopped reading the current racing rags. It was a bittersweet moment to ralize that after many decades of being a reader and subscriber that Autosport was not something I really looked forward to any more.

An interesting technique used by many of the True Scribes was to have a few folks stationed about the track to compare notes with after practice and the race. It was a proud moment to have DSJ ask me about an incident at Monza, make some notes, and hustle off to peer into a car on the pitlane....

I am always surprised how much I enjoy reading so of the old race reports in magazines. They are so different than what you find today. Ah, where is HNM III when we need him?

Being in the job, I can tell that the first reason of this pity is television: now everyone can see the event, that's why sports article in particular changed so much (not only about F1). And a reporter must act keeping well in mind this change: my reader has already seen today's race and listened to interviews, so, what I write about now? How can I put interest on a thing he already knows?
At schools of journalism they learn such things.

Then there are also other reasons, but this is the main one.

With a very few honourable exceptions, the team principals and veterans I know within current Formula 1 regard all current specialist print publications and their writers as completely out-of-touch, know-nothing wastes of space - easily manipulated purveyors of fiction, most unwanted, a little at the team principals' own instigation. This atmosphere contrasts almost diametrically with the 'one-of-us' relationships created and enjoyed between writers and racers from the 1940s into the 1970s... A friend of mine who still works regularly in Formula 1 tells me he no longer even bothers to seek contact with some leading drivers, since a team PR person will always field the request, and then come back with a time and date for "no more than 10 minutes, oh and six other journos will be sitting in on the interview". Occasionally a leading driver rebels against the spin doctor tyranny, and will spend serious time with someone for whom he has some regard. But it's an increasingly rare event.

DCN

Originally posted by Doug Nye
With a very few honourable exceptions, the team principals and veterans I know within current Formula 1 regard all current specialist print publications and their writers as completely out-of-touch, know-nothing wastes of space...


DCN

Well, look at the standard of race reportage in a certain weekly comic these days. A few paragraphs about how awful F1 is, then a perfunctory race report that someone watching the race on the telly and fast forwarding through the dull bits could've tossed off in an hour - then several pages of "infodump" with brightly coloured graphics and little text boxes that save you the trouble of reading any continuous prose that might make your head hurt. (Mind you, there's also Mark Hughes' poetic and penetrating analysis of what the drivers are doing on track, something I do miss.....)

Do the readers get the sort of coverage they deserve? Maybe; people seem to be voting with their feet as far as the magazines are concerned; those left behind seem to be the ones who don't find modern F1 distateful. And (playing Devil's Advocate) in a soundbite/factoid world and in a sport where so much that goes on is inaccessible to the public, who needs a good journalist to cover the race?

I couldn't believe how bloated yet superficial the two dedicated F1 mags were. F1 Racing seemed to believe that we would find the "celebrity lifestyles" of the drivers fascinating; the Bernie F1 magazine was the Home of the Infodump. I bought the first Bernie F1 annual which was compiled from it and found my eyes glazing over every time I opened it. No F1 season needs coverage that's down at the "combined mass of bowel movement per team member per championship point" level. What it needs is synthesis, synopsis, and analysis, not something that looks like a management accountant has been playing with Excel for three months.

There will never be another Jenks or HNM III or Lyons or even Roebuck (who's descended into a sort of Hunter S Thompsonesque parody of himself where the occasional references to sport exist in a personal and rather repetitive narrative of bile...). The last remaining hopes of F1 journalism are Mark Hughes, who's poetic and thoroughly besotted by the sheer animal, kinetic grace of a racing car cornering, and Simon Arron, who's trenchant and witty. Adam Cooper's also superb at getting inside the minds of drivers he knows well, but is he still writing weekly or is he off doing books (I heard he was working on something else after the superb Piers Courage book....)

Mark Hughes' poetic and penetrating analysis of what the drivers are doing on track,....

I like it too....but I am also privy to where some of the inspiration comes from.....

It ain't so easy for the uninitiated...

Jp

Originally posted by Barry Boor

Nowadays, if you want to see what sort of race Alonso had, you will find about 4 lines under a picture of his helmet.

In case you missed it at the press conference after the Suzuka GP Alonso was lamenting how his pit strategy had been all wrong. He said something along the lines of "for the World Championship I made 3 or 4 passes but today I passed 13 or 14 times."

There is only so much anyone can say about passing in the pits and make it interesting. In the past something actually happened within a race meaning there was human drama worth communicating to an audience without a television. Previous generations did have a longer attention span as well which helped ;)

Thankfully there are some publications, admittedly not the glossy Formula 1 type, that continue the tradition of publishing event reports. In a lot of cases the main problem isn't necessarily the perceived short attention span of the reader nor the insatiable appetite for statistics but simply a lack of space due to the publication carrying too many adverts!

I know that the adverts pay for the publication not the over-the-counter sales, what I can't understand is the lack of vision by the publishers that cutting down the space devoted to the reports is acceptable. Surely all they need to do is chuck in an extra double page and Robert is your mother's brother!

As for the comments about computers over typewriters all I can say to those bemoaning the transition is that without the computers there would be no TNF! So grow up!

Originally posted by Stephen W
what I can't understand is the lack of vision by the publishers that cutting down the space devoted to the reports is acceptable. Surely all they need to do is chuck in an extra double page and Robert is your mother's brother!

What you also don't seem to understand, Stephen, is that a double page can't just be "chucked in". To comply with the requirements of the printing processes it would have to be four more pages, or more likely 16. Paper is a very big cost factor these days, so if you're printing 50,000 copies of your publication that's 800,000 more pages you'd have to pay for, not to mention other costs such as make-up, contributors' fees etc.
To cover that cost in a static market you either increase the cover price (and risk driving away possible buyers), increase the advertising rates (ditto advertisers) or increase the amount of advertising.

Actually, having stopped buying Autosport in the early 1990s, I've taken to picking it up again recently. I don't disagree with many of the problems you've listed here but its just about worth the cover price for a) Mark Hughes' stuff and b) Marcus Pye who is still somehow clinging on at the back of the magazine.

The biggest single problem with the magazine is that the writers appear to be working to ridiculously low maximum wordcounts - race reports and columns are only about half the length they typically were when I first started reading it as a kid in the mid 1980s.

Originally posted by David McKinney

What you also don't seem to understand, Stephen, is that a double page can't just be "chucked in". To comply with the requirements of the printing processes it would have to be four more pages, or more likely 16. Paper is a very big cost factor these days, so if you're printing 50,000 copies of your publication that's 800,000 more pages you'd have to pay for, not to mention other costs such as make-up, contributors' fees etc.
To cover that cost in a static market you either increase the cover price (and risk driving away possible buyers), increase the advertising rates (ditto advertisers) or increase the amount of advertising.

Suddenly a double page becomes 16, what are you on?

The other costs would be minimal. You wouldn't use any more photos and the written word is the cheapest thing that the publishers pay for.

Offset against this minimal extra cost would be the potentential of picking up more advertisers.

All it needs is a bit of faith in the readers, you never know it may attract back more punters like Haddock!

Suddenly a double page becomes 16, what are you on?

The other costs would be minimal. You wouldn't use any more photos and the written word is the cheapest thing that the publishers pay for.

Offset against this minimal extra cost would be the potentential of picking up more advertisers.

All it needs is a bit of faith in the readers, you never know it may attract back more punters like Haddock!

Not even any need for more pages. Autosport is no thinner than it ever was.

It just needs better graphic design. Roebuck and Hughes' columns for instance are full of white space. Doubtless some marketing guru thinks this makes the magazine more attractive to readers, but I don't pay to stare at a picture of Roebuck's dictaphone or Hughes' every week. Slightly fewer, or smaller pictures and more text woul d fix the same problems for the race reports.

Oh, and if I can have a wishlist - could Autosport *please* stop using the word 'fever' all the time - it sounds like something lifted from James Allen's awful ITV commentaries....

Originally posted by Haddock

Not even any need for more pages. Autosport is no thinner than it ever was.

It just needs better graphic design. Roebuck and Hughes' columns for instance are full of white space.

Twenty five years ago we had a tongue-in-cheek expression on Autosport; 'white space talks' which was basically an ironic dig at trendy graphic designers. Some things don't change...

Oh, and if I can have a wishlist - could Autosport *please* stop using the word 'fever' all the time

Hmmm... I started that, I'm afraid, back in 1981. As I've mentioned before, I'd never have believed they'd still be using it all these years later. And I agree, it's way over-used these days.

Originally posted by Stephen W


Suddenly a double page becomes 16, what are you on?

Could be, could be. Maybe not always 16, but 8 is quite sure. Don't know the Autosport case though.

Doug, as usual, pointed out two other very good matters, but they don't take value only about F1 journalism, it's only a sign of the times: first, the fact that everything (FIA, teams, managers, drivers, events etc. etc.) has its own press staff and then that the number of journalists increased so much that it left F1 people without time for each of them!
A bit joking about the second point, but it's not that false.

By the way, as said, these two aspects are true for the whole press, while tv is a lot more related to sport events and so their press reports.

I hope my English was quite good not to generate confusion...

Originally posted by ozzy.g

I hope my English was quite good not to generate confusion...

Rest assured that your command of English is better than some of the native English-speakers who visit this forum!

;)

With regard to increasing the folios, an 8pp section used to be the minimum for Autosport.

Oh well...thanks! I am trying to do my best.

I had the suspect that it was 8 pages for Autocar too. That's nearly a rule.