Firstly, I don't know if this is the right place for a question like this - but I'm sure that the people I want to reach and hear opinions are here, so I believe the Nostalgia Forum is the right spot for it.
Well, as we are getting closer and closer to the end of the year, now comes the moment of reflection, on what the future may bring us.
My question is mainly focused on what the future of Vintage Automotive Sports Journalism will be. As a journalist and someone who is passionate about the 60s and 70s era, what I see with with each passing year is that the audience that is interested in this kind of stuff becomes more and more restricted. Even though I'm young (well, I only have 24!) I understand that much of the public that is interested in this kind of topics is getting older, without having a sufficient number of interested people who can refresh/replenish these numbers.
We live in a time of immediacy, where people want to know only whats in happening now - and probably things that in a few minutes will be outdated by other new facts. On the other hand, the history is timeless; perhaps that's why it is neglected by most people today. I can see this in specialized motorsport magazines, where special reports about the past (and when I talk about the past, I expect at least something that happened 15 years ago) are increasingly rare.
I recognize that this also happens due to the immediacy of everyday life. In current journalism, 'everything is for yesterday' and you are always late. But anyone who has ever written a report or book about a race that happened 60 or 70 years ago knows that this kind of thing is a time-consuming process – researching the material is a headache (when it´s not locked behind paywalls); finding the copyright owners of images from the time is another; and the weeks go by, something that doesn't exist in a modern newsroom.
So, I don't know if in 15 or 20 years there will be more than a handful of people interested in knowing what the Gordon Bennetts were, the meaningfulness of the 1914 French GP, the importance of Brooklands (ye, that topic here kkkkk) or even who Maurice Trintignant, Lorenzo Bandini, Willy Mairesse and many other pilots from the 60s were (P.S. sry for mixing up the eras, but is just to give examples of what I´m trying to explain).
So I'd like to hear everyone's opinion - I know some journalists come to this blog to look up information on certain topics, so I'd love to hear their opinion as well.