When The Blogging Flag Drops…
Veteran F1 reporter Joe Saward talks about the issues around blogging, wire services, quotas for stories, attendance (or otherwise), in the world of online F1 coverage:
In part this is due to people called news aggregators. These are the bottom feeders of F1 who pick up stories wherever they can, in whatever language. They have no means of checking the information they gather and so they package up the stories in bite-sized chunks and pump them out to dozens of lazy websites that run the same stuff. This has two effects: the first is that they have deals for x number of news items a day and so if they cannot find enough stuff, they stretch the facts, or run non-stop “he said-she said” stories, with nothing but claims and denials; the second is that an awful lot of websites have exactly the same stories and all of it is pretty lightweight because no one writing it is actually involved in the sport and thus they have no idea about their subject matter – and no contacts to even ask. This is the downside of so-called citizen journalism.
Saward is an old-school reporter, travelling to each Grand Prix, and has a subscription magazine for his online followers alongside his blog, and his thoughts reflect that older approach. There needs to be some progress in reporting, but the microcosm of F1 feels like a reflection of the larger questions around journalism today.
