The Plight of the Modern Young Motorsport Journalist

Growth of so-called volunteer led media raises serious questions over the profession.

Over Christmas and New Year, when almost everything was closed, I found myself exploring LinkedIn. No skiing holiday for me - instead, I was scrolling through LinkedIn! Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. However, as someone who writes about motorsport, despite its strangeness, it’s a good place to get a ‘vibe’ about what’s happening out there for like-minded individuals. What I witnessed, however, wasn’t exactly heartening.

Everyone knows sports media is a tough racket [sips drink], and especially motorsport. Autosport is going monthly and GP Racing is apparently no more. Sure, print media is dying, we all know this, but it represents something significant. While F1 is generating ever more revenue and success, can we actually say opportunities are increasing for everyone else?

Again, I am going on vibes because data on this is hard to find, but there are a lot of young people, many fresh out of university, looking for work in the motorsport industry as journalists. Now, I have quite a high bar for what I consider a journalist. This is a recent thing because I once incorrectly considered myself one but now I am content to describe myself as a writer with a taste for some investigatory stuff. My writing is often too chaotic and sporadic, as I am sure some of you notice, to warrant any kind of journalistic acclaim. Either way, when I looked for where this work could be, I saw a barren landscape.

Me interviewing Bruno Senna at some kart event 15 or so years ago, nice chap.

There was once a time when I just about scraped a living writing about karting, and many years ago someone like Alan Burgess made a real career out of it with the long-gone Karting Magazine. What alarmed me is that I had more opportunities 10 years ago writing about karting, which was in a declining state then, than a lot of graduates wanting to get into a sport that is apparently booming - Formula 1.

See, Formula 1’s growth has inspired a generation of students who are entering the real working world now. But F1’s growth doesn't necessarily mean more opportunity. If anything, there’s less opportunity. F1 is a very small club. It might have a huge fan base and enormous revenue, but the actual sport itself is made up of 10, soon to be 11, touring teams. It’s quite small. There isn’t a huge media attachment either. Access is limited, and professional opportunities are quite limited too. The creates power dynamics which often need to have a close eye kept upon them.

You can’t waltz into Silverstone on a miserable winter’s day and blag your way into some stories anymore with a scoop about some technical development. Nope, it’s a closed shop, and truth be told, there isn’t a huge number of stories that can be written now anyway. Quite a significant chunk of F1 writing now is people writing the same stuff.

So we have what I believe to be a quite small, high-pressure industry with now an oversupply of people wanting to get in. The consequences of that I’ll soon go into. It’s not something that just affects F1; sports journalism in general is similar. One graduate on LinkedIn, who had just earned a degree in Sports Journalism, wrote:

“Since graduating this year with a Sports Journalism degree, I have failed to get into the industry (after contacting over 200 people and applying for many jobs in the sector) alongside zero work support/guidance from the uni I went to woefully! Currently, I have applied for over 330 jobs in a multitude of industries (not just journalism), completed five interviews and received zero job offers.”

Now, it may be the case, and I am sure this is true for a number of students, that they don’t meet the required literary standards. Perhaps the industry was always tough to begin with. I guess I take issue with the fact that we have a lot of young people going through degrees that carry the façade of leading to professional opportunities, yet very little effort is made to actually educate them on just how much professional opportunity there really is. I’ve said elsewhere that motorsport is often a hobby masquerading as a profession, and the reality is that sports writing isn’t too different, especially motorsport writing.

In some ways, I see parallels with motorsport engineering programmes. A lot of time is spent encouraging young people into the field, while on the other hand, we see ever more growth of ‘spec-racing’ as a tool for so-called talent spotting. I do wonder what jobs are actually being created for engineers if all we do is remove the ‘engineering’ aspect from motorsport. I know from experience that ‘spec’ racing leaves writers with little to write about, and it’s worse for truly innovative engineers, who often just end up turning into maintenance experts. I digress.

What piqued my interest with this recent excursion into Linkedin was seeing a lot of graduates writing for outlets I have not really heard of before but which seem to have the mantra of being ‘volunteer-led’. I know young writers will hope to use these as a springboard into real jobs, but it all seems a bit strange to me because I am wondering where the ‘real jobs’ are. Marketing and PR? Sure. But independent writing about motorsport? It’s bleak.

One of these media outlets is limited companies and, on the surface, look like any other motorsport website, but they are actually staffed almost entirely by volunteer writers yet boast accreditations. I’ve seen ‘job posts’ for market experts that are merely volunteer roles. This is all fine, people can do what they want, but it highlights the issues facing young writers, especially when these volunteer roles require their own expenses to be covered too.

In one job posting elsewhere, I saw someone who claims to be an F1 Reporter advertising a new venture and looking for an “Engagement and Growth Manager - responsible for business development.” However, the position was “voluntary” and required 2–3 years of experience. I can’t help but ask myself - what business? This isn’t just about volunteer writers; this involves managerial roles too!

While I look upon these things with a degree of skepticism, even demonstrably well-meaning and motivated outlets aren’t able to pay writers. Take Females in Motorsport, for instance. This is not a slight against them as a media outlet; it is to highlight something critical about the situation. Here we have a well-known brand that writes about various women within the motorsport space. They have 128k followers on Instagram, 25k followers on Facebook, and 50k followers on LinkedIn. They even boast that they’ve reached over 25 million people. They are writing about incredibly lucrative and well-funded businesses, providing them with valuable exposure, but they are volunteer-based. According to a LinkedIn reply, and to their credit, they used to pay writers, but now, “post-2022,” they do not as it’s no longer possible. This is the harsh reality of the situation. If they can’t, who can?

In an age of declining ad revenues, it is no wonder this is the case. I can’t speak for the motivations of companies opting for the volunteer-led angle, but it is a very tough market if you want to pay writers for their work. If we take a look at F1 Media Accreditation requirements, if you’re a website, you must provide a “substantial proportion of the coverage of the Championship free of charge to the public.” This would suggest that paywalls aren’t an option, and websites are “expected to receive a minimum of 250,000 unique users per month on their Formula 1 coverage.” Even then, this still doesn’t guarantee accreditation.

When you see figures like this, you can somewhat forgive outlets for publishing various clickbait-style headlines and articles. You have to reach these figures or it’s game over.

With F1’s absolute dominance over the motorsport landscape, this increased supply of budding writers is meeting an industry that is struggling to generate any kind of meaningful income. Now, obviously, that’s not to say there isn’t opportunity - we have professional F1 journalists, after all. My aim here is to provide young people with insight into the challenges of this so-called industry that appears to be experiencing a growth of ‘volunteer-led’ outlets rather than truly profit-driven ones.

So, where’s the real journalism, the good stuff? Well, I believe there are a lot of stories that could be uncovered in motorsport. We all hear things through the grapevine, and being involved in karting, you always bump into interesting characters. There does seem to be a focus on gaining accreditation and access to F1 or something similar, like MotoGP, but in terms of hard-hitting, actual stories, these are often found elsewhere. With ‘access’ comes the fear of losing it. Just how much can a journalist push in the F1 paddock? I’m not so sure.

Personally, I don’t care much for the F1 paddock and find F1’s incursion into karting, as well as its overall cultural dominance over motorsport in recent years, to be a net negative. So, I’ll say what I feel, others don’t really have such a luxury. Such is the competition that, if you lose that badge of ‘credibility’, things become very difficult indeed, especially when you have mouths to feed. This is part of the problem. As F1 has become more of a closed shop and its dominance over the motorsport landscape has increased, little room is left for opportunities elsewhere. At the end of the day, the audience is king.

So, the question then remains: what value is there in being a motorsport journalist? If your audience is small, how do you expect to get paid? This is my concern, and we do need to get to brass tacks. As we see the growth of the ‘freelance journalist’, we also see that investment and risk must be taken to attend events, even if they are being paid for the actual words produced. I think an honest conversation needs to be had with young writers so they can build some fortitude and realistic expectations.

I once scraped a living writing about karting, but I often have to have serious words with myself about spending. It’s not sustainable like it once was. I can generate some money on platforms like this, YouTube, and through book sales, but these aren’t guaranteed or significant. Even then, they put me in a weird position of actually earning a little money from writing about motorsport, which isn’t the case for a lot of budding young writers.

My advice to them would be not to worry about gaining ‘access’ to F1. It’s unlikely anyway. Think like a journalist and look for real motorsport stories. I do think there’s an appetite out there for this kind of content, as people grow fatigued by the clickbait nature of mainstream coverage. Anytime I post something with a tinge of ‘realness’ about it, it tends to be popular. Use your instincts, if something feels a bit off, investigate it.

Writing race reports for free, or regurgitating things already published on The Race or Autosport, won’t do you much good. There are millions of others doing the same.

I feel your pain, but I urge anyone taking the leap into writing please start a Substack, or something similar, and get digging. If you’re going to write for free, it’s best that your own name is above the door, at least then you can monetise it yourself.