Category: Formula 1

When The Blogging Flag Drops…

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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

Twenty Years Without Roland Ratzenberger

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At this time of year, I remember one of the best pieces that Jim Hughes posted on my former Formula 1 blog Fun-1. It was a tongue in cheek look at the F1 world, with the occasional serious moment. Such as this one. Which still resonates this time every year: Today is the tenth anniversary of Ayrton Senna’s death at Imola. So what has happened in Formula 1? Are the cars safer, slower, is the driving cleaner? Yes, No and definitely not – Michael’s outrageous punting off of JPM at Imola is graphic evidence of how low F1 driver standards have sunk

Content farms, old school journalism, and Formula One

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Joe Saward, a decidedly old school journalist who has strong views on the modern web and sports reporting The secret of the F1 media is that it is like a pond. If you drop a stone in the middle, the waves will radiate outwards. The middle is made up the relatively small group of reporters, most of them English. The vast majority of F1 websites have no access at all to the F1 paddock and they are simply part of the ripples on the F1 pond, taking the story from the centre and spreading it. I should flag up at

Remembering Roland

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Many years ago, Jim Hughes and I had a Formula 1 blog called Fun-1. The goal then was to try and be sarcastic, bitchy, and portray a sport that was almost, not quite unlike, Formula 1. We had a lot of fun with it, but as F1 became more soap opera, it started to read a little bit too much like real news. But one of Jim’s posts always stuck with me, and with all the tweets popping up today (May 1st), I wanted to revisit that post. One hunt through backups and archives later, and it gets a re-post