[Magazines] I've done it - I've cancelled Autosport

[bella]

Originally Posted by AdamAshmore

I happen to have every 1982 Autosport. They a good examples of being "above all informative". 2007 magazines aren't, IMHO.

i think that's quite an interesting remark - i think a massive problem now is that everybody is completely up to date with everything that happens thanks to the internet. so you're looking at the magazines without the blanket coverage of the news and events from 1982 that we have currently. with this in mind, the problem is knowing what to cover and i think autosport and most other publications are struggling with this. i'm not sure the solution is a whole stack of opinion based largely formula 1 nonsense though. i find it extremely patronising when a magazine starts telling me how to think. i'm not reading it for that - i'd rather see more in depth coverage of teams and drivers and the real people in the sport, for example. things that are interesting to read.

on another note, autosport are, i note, very clever in supplying very brief race report of the lower formulae which mean to find out exactly what happened you have to read the magazine. unfortunately, because of the word and space limits, you can't get everything into the race report that should be there. i would love to hear drivers opinions on incidents in races, regardless of how low down the field they are. i'd like to see spectator based opinion too on the sidebars - what did people who saw the incidents think? did they enjoy the races? that completely goes against my lack of tolerance for journalists pedalling their opinion with regards to f1, but why not ask the people? not everyone sees everything at meetings without live tv available in the press room...

out of interest, would someone who has a copy of autosport from say, 1982, be able to list the table of contents on the thread? let those of us who don't have encyclopaedic collections of magazines see the changes for ourselves....

[AvdB]

Last week's Autosport

News leads

Ferrari targets title turnaround

Exclusive comments from Ferrari regarding their approch to winning the title

- as informative an F1 story as you could read that week.

Mol closer to Spyker take over

- exclusive Mol comments on the situation.

Lloyd eyes IndyCars after Ganassi test

- world exclusive story with unique quotes.

Does Champ Car need Europe?

1200-word news analysis. Not seen anywhere else

Neal's car written off in huge Brands smash

Detailed piece with quotes from all drivers involved.

GT world order plan

Full analysis on next stage in GT plan. Not seen on dsc, or anywhere else.

Rule change could halt Suzuki WRC.

How new manufacturer could be put off joining WRC. Full of exclusive quotes.

OK. So what area of the sport are we not telling the casual reader about? What's not 'informative' about these stories? What did we miss that we should have covered?

I really want to know.

[luke]

Originally Posted by AvdB

What really riles me are these tabloid accusations. I really wonder if you know what that means.

A sharp headline? Surely not.

Sensationalist reporting? Closer. And we just don't do that. Autosport articles are well-researched, written in measured and considered tones and are above all informative. Re-written press releases, which pass as news on the web, do not make the pages of this magazine.

Yes, we may 'dumb down' on the cover, for want of a better phrase. And I have some sympathy with loyal readers who may feel irritated or patronised by this approach. But the mag has to work as a business propostion, and this means trying to maximise the sales of every issue. It's a policy no different from every other magazine on the news stand.

I wish it was different. I wish I could put a beautiful shot of a 908 (the Peugeot, not the Porsche) on the cover without committing sales suicide. I would probably be sacked if I did this.

I've been reading Autosport for over 20 years and I honestly think the coverage is as good now, if not better, as it was when I started reading it. And if ever I doubt that, I just need to look at the 1982 issue after Niki Lauda tested a Brabham and the story was a brief...

Autosport is now a tabloid magazine and has become that over the years. The headlines often don't relate to the whole story or the true meaning. The whole news section is set out in tabloid style. The reports of news always end up going offtopic at the end.

The features etc are usually filled up with big pictures and only a few paragraphs some how stretching 3-4 pages. I don't have a problem with adverts even though it seems to be 1 page of an advert every 3.

As for the covers there alway seems to be F1 on there just for the sake of it. It's not really news half the time. Especially with Button in the past when Autosport was in affect Buttonsport. When he won his first race the next issue of Autosport was devoted to him as if he had won the world championship. The Ferrari vs Mclaren War cover wasn't news. An F1 car on the cover just seems to be on there for the sake of it.

The reports of races are thin and uninteresting other than the F1 reports which are very good.

Many of us subcribers over years have ended their subscriptions as we just don't find this appealing. I wonder when Autosport will appeal to the motorsport enthusiast and not just the casual F1 fan. The lack of reports for non F1 is one of the main reasons why I no longer buy the magazine.

[AvdB]

Sorry Luke. Heard it all before. Don't believe it.

Big pictures = tabloid?

What about making an attractive magazine? The one place magazines can beat the web is in design. There is no hope of Autosport running smaller pictures in the future.

How can making uninteresting reports longer make them better?

Autosport is designed to appeal to enthusiasts. If we were soley interested in the casual punter, would we even bother running reports from LMS races with a handful of spectators?

[luke]

Originally Posted by AvdB

Sorry Luke. Heard it all before. Don't believe it.

Big pictures = tabloid?

What about making an attractive magazine? The one place magazines can beat the web is in design. There is no hope of Autosport running smaller pictures in the future.

How can making uninteresting reports longer make them better?

Autosport is designed to appeal to enthusiasts. If we were soley interested in the casual punter, would we even bother running reports from LMS races with a handful of spectators?

Avdb, It's just the headlines in the news section, and the way it's mapped out and how the stories tend to waver off in the last paragraph doesn't give you that feeling of a magazine but tid-bits in the tabloid style. I get the feeling am I reading nuts sometimes?

As for the big pictures, yes it is nice to have an attractive magazine but I get the feeling they are added into the features and interviews with drivers etc just to make a few paragraphs of a story into 3-4 pages along with a page of adverts of 2.

As for CC and IRL race reports, they are now much smaller, thiner and less interesting than what they used to be. In the period that I didn't have sky I relied dearly on Autosport for the race reports of US racing. When I have missed a race due to being on holiday I get autosport to check out the race reports and I see them as lazy and only in there to add pages.

I know for the Daytona 500 there are a few pages covered in the race report, but at the back along with Grand-Am and club racing with a paragraph report isn't interesting and very thin. I understand NASCAR races do change in the last faze of the race but doesn't mean you have to forget about the other 480 miles of the race.

As I see it, Autosport only appeals to the casual F1 fan that sees an F1 car for any reason on the front cover. There just isn't a following for non F1 and that is why many motorsport fans no longer buy Autosport. I can see this change that has happened over the 7 years of buying Autosport. I hope when I see an Autosport in newsagents or petrol station I will want to buy it but I haven't had that feeling for a few years. I remember the days of going into to town Thursday morning before school as soon as the newsagents opened (before I subscribed to) as I was that keen on getting Autosport. The interst has certainly gone.

The F1 race reports and previews are very good don't get me wrong, I just wish all the other series had more serious coverage of the races etc.

[Adam43]

The Ferrari turn around article was OK, better than normal! Although I think you over-play the "Exclusive comments from Ferrari"! The we can win all the races beause we have the capacity quote seems to come from a story run on Autosport.com on the 9th August (elsewhere beforehand).
I don't remember reading the Ferrari source quote before though.

Originally Posted by AvdB

Autosport is designed to appeal to enthusiasts.

I think luke, Peter, old man, Aysedasi and others above can be described as enthusiasts. And quite a wide cross section too.

If we were soley interested in the casual punter, would we even bother running reports from LMS races with a handful of spectators?

True, I'd love '82 style Sportscar reports (quantity and quality). However the current position of Sportscar doesn't warrant it.

For me it is the quality of the F1 reporting that sets the tone. I am not a fan of the race reports and rarely find the lead article informative. Although it seems that luke likes the F1 reports.

[AvdB]

It is true that IRL and Champ Car reports are smaller. In fact, they've reduced in correlation to the grid numbers.

If (and it never will happen alas) they got back together, the reports would go straight back to 4-pages.

I'm sorry you'd rather read prosaic headlines and not the snappier ones (don't forget there's only limited space). Pics don't take away from words in features. Tyically there's 500/700 words per page in a feature. Thus a 5-pager will be 2500 words regardless of whether the opening spread is a lovely big picture.

I disagree that non-F1 fans aren't buying the mag. There's maybe a dozen people on here who've lost the faith, but subscription levels are healthy, and in general reactions to the mag are positive. At least that was the vibe I picked up at Thruxton on the weekend.

I would love to cover all championships to the level we do F1, but it simply isn't logistically possible. But we are the only mag in the world - and this is true - that has full-time correspondents in

F1, WRC, GP2, World Series, DTM, Euro F3, Brit F3, Champ Car, IRL, LMS, FIA GT, ALMS, NASCAR, BTCC, WTCC, A1GP and all number of national championships. It's a difficult balancing act, and I'm not pretending it's perfect. But to say we are only interested in F1 is just plan wrong.

Re our F1 coverage. It's each to his own of course, but I think our team of Mark Hughes, Nigel Roebuck, Steve Cooper, Tony Dodgin, Adam Cooper, Gary Anderson and Giorgio Piola plus Jonathan Noble online, is world-class. Mark's reports give you information you cannot get on TV. Nigel's columns remain excellent and brilliantly written. Tony's analysis pieces bring a different slant to news, while Adam's q&a's give voices to people you normally don't hear from.

I'm extremely proud of the tech section, which is the best there is. Overall, I think it's a pretty strong package. But we're always keen to make it better. What would you like to see?

[Graham Goodwin]

Originally Posted by AvdB

Last week's Autosport

GT world order plan

Full analysis on next stage in GT plan. Not seen on dsc, or anywhere else.

Perhaps not seen by you on dailysportscar Andrew but plenty of others will have seen it - We carried it 2 weeks before you did!

[ss_collins]

I'm extremely proud of the tech section, which is the best there is.

Thats certainly true, only Autosprint does anything similar and its does not have the lovely GP drawings. But as a lot of it is on aero bits sometimes the analysis is very speculative. However short of going to a wind tunnel and trying it yourself you won't find out. This is where Racecar diverges from Autosport - to analyse the effects of wheel covers (Ferrari style) we made some and actually did go and spend time in the tunnel. But we specialise in technology so we are expected to be closer to the mark and try not to speculate.

But if you ask a team tech director what mags he gets they will all say RCE and Autosport I think. You have to think as reader about what you want - if its race reports and news - Autosport, Rally news, national racing and fun features - MN - a better publication for what it does (sorry Andy you know where my loyalties lie!), technology and engineering - RCE or Race Tech, Business - ??? (PMW, The Paddock, BF1 are all sort of there).

Could Autosport improve - certainly, but what I like is Intersection style meanders of reports - what you might like could be different. Everyone can improve.

By the way when we put a nice shot of the 908 on the cover our circulation went up.

[Peter Mallett]

Originally Posted by luke

Autosport is now a tabloid magazine and has become that over the years. The headlines often don't relate to the whole story or the true meaning.

That's the point I was making.

Avdb, my apologies for calling you Andy, blame it on eyesight (hope the MSA are'nt reading this). I'm using a ppc on the beach and misread your 'handle'.

All your points are valid from a business sense but surely it is reasonable to assume that if you are losing the loyal support, as Adam points, out the result will be too few sales after Lewis either wins the WDC or worse, these casuals will drop it like a hot brick if he loses.

Where do you go then?

[Knowlesy]

To the wall probably.

Most have summed up all the problems here perfectly so I have nothing to add that is new really.

And bigger NASCAR reports would be better yes (three words for the Brickyard 400 or Watkins Glen reports for example looks increasingly preposterous), but that is hardly the root of Autosports problems.

[AvdB]

Autosport remains a profitable title, and prior to this season we hadn't budgetted for the success (and massive sales hike) of Lewis's success. The medium-term future of the magazine is assured.

Long-term? Who knows? At some point in the future there's going to be a mass cull of print titles as internet publishing takes over. Autosport.com is undoubtedly the future, but I still think there's plenty of life left in our rag yet.

[old man]

Originally Posted by Graham Goodwin

Perhaps not seen by you on dailysportscar Andrew but plenty of others will have seen it - We carried it 2 weeks before you did!

Sorry AvdB but GG is correct and my beef would be, whilst the piece by Gary Watkins was excellent and gave us a good idea of what was to come in some 700 words or so the report on an actual GT race was 270 or so words with just 60 on GT1

You justify the poor reporting of LMS by quoting the crown figures, perhaps the organisers of LMS blame the crown figures on poor magazine coverage? The technical development of sports and GT cars is excellent and directly related to the cars the casual enthusiast can identify with and perhaps either own or covet, you simply do not do it justice and yet it is a very strong GB area. OK, I admit to a bias here but many on this forum will agree I think and by giving it better coverage the casual buyer of your magazine may just be tempted to learn more, the racing was, in fact quite interesting but 4 classes is a lot to follow for 6 hours, especially for 1 man

Just one other point about headlines "Ferrari Target Title Turnaround" is just plain naff, what else do they do all year round, it is a headline that says zilch, the content was far better than the headline promised

[AvdB]

Fair comments, although the dsc story couldn't have carried the quotes ours did, especially as our story was published on the day of the meeting.

Poor reporting? I never said such a thing.

I'll take your point on the Ferrari headline and chastise the sub who came up with it!

[luke]

I have looked threw the whole thread now and I have to say we all seem to share a rather similar opinion. We all obviously liked Autosport previously, but these last few years we don't like the route it has gone down.

I think threw the 13 pages thus far, surely the rest of the British and even international motor sport fan base feel the similar way.

Sure, report Lewis' fantastic rookie season, his great achievements, but him stealing the whole focuses of the magazine with his podium finish over Brit Dario's Indy 500 win showed me the current situation for me. The whole Buttonmania thing was one thing and I understand having Lewis on the front is important new to sales and appealing to the stroke causal semi fan, but F1 shouldn't automatically dominant the cover and the first part of the magazine even when there isn't much news.

My ideas to improve Autosport which it needs these last 2 years is to get rid of the week in pictures double page. It just gives me the whole impression that they are just priniting pretty little pictures with tabloid type headings underneath.

Extend the magazine to 120 pages.

Have more insights each week. Have the technial insights of not just F1, but of the prototypes of sports cars etc. New racing cars.

Indepth Interviews with drivers and team members.

More coverage of non F1 and lose the tabloid style.

As for the increased price over the past I am OK with that as long as the quality improves.

[chunder]

I think the person involved has hot the nail on the head with the online comment!

Publishers are of course going to try their very level best and get you to subscribe to the online magazine, No print costs, no distribution costs!

If they get enough subscribers then they will easily make a profit, Yes the magazine will still need copy and still need to be put together by staff but the costs will be drastically reduced. Its the way forward for SOME aspects of media, but sadly most people I think will still like to be able to pick something up rather than look at a screen.

For me the mag has always been rather too focussed on the more boring racing series, I cant really get excited about F1 or sports cars as there simply isnt enough going on and I cant ever get into 24 hour or 4 hour races! Thats the length of a meeting in the sort of things I like watching! I have gone away from RACMSA based racing as its far too formal and far too snobbish and there simply isnt enough action to keep me entertained or interested. THat meana I have to get ny news via the net or trough specialised press which is fine as I ahve a specialist interest.
Autosport rememebr tries to cater for everyone so cant be as detailed, or focussed as it used to be.

I appreciate that most readers like those kind of things but you have to understand that no on goes to watch it! And that vast majority of motorsport fans in the UK are mainly F1 fans hence the obsession with F1 and UK drivers. Any motorsport magazine expecially a weekely has to take this into account or it loses its core readership and becomes the wet lettuce like MN! Haymarket very cleverly annhilated their main rival by buying them and forcing them to go into a new area (sort of) and thereby deleting their biggest rival to the detriment of both!

Its a shame magazines cant be the way they were ten or fiftenn years ago, where the reporter could wax lyrical a bit more and you could get more of a feel. I even used to read F3000 reports and sports car reports, but now they (writers) are so hemmed in by style and being utterly factual and tight that readers cant identify with the writer, its just totally faceless! And all because the they think thats what we want!

[John Turner]

Crikey, this has really kicked off again over the last few days.

Originally Posted by luke

Extend the magazine to 120 pages.

Have more insights each week. Have the technial insights of not just F1, but of the prototypes of sports cars etc. New racing cars.

Indepth Interviews with drivers and team members.

More coverage of non F1 and lose the tabloid style.

As for the increased price over the past I am OK with that as long as the quality improves.

Notwithstanding the criticisms that the magazine has received here, it does seem that not everybody shares the same view of what they actually want from it. Someone has rightly said that you can't please all the people all the time. As motor racing enthusiasts, we all have our areas of particular interest. Surely we don't all expect that every piece written within the covers is going to hold our interest? I don't think that I have ever read any mag from cover to cover and in the case of A/S I tend to skip the rallying, for example. As for the depth of reporting, whilst not wishing to regurgitate all that has gone before, I will repeat the fact that the number of race meetings has increased substantially over the years, and I cannot imagine the number of pages required to cover all of them in the depth that they were, say, 30 years ago, and therefore at what cost.

I'm not very happy with some of the front covers either, but as Andrew says, it is surely the 'meat' which is important, and hardly a reason not to open it to find out what's inside. Ok, so it doesn't have the balance that we all want. It won't surprise you to learn that I'd love to see a bigger 'National' section, particularly for greater coverage of historic racing (now, a very substantial branch of motorsport on its own) but I'm guessing that mine is a minority view which if addressed is unlikely to have a positive impact on circulation or profit.

It is true that Autosport has no real weekly printed competitors (except its Haymarket bedfellow, of course) but that is hardly its fault, and would we really want another one just to split a readership that already has internet alternatives?

Luke, your suggestions, on the face of it seem reasonable, but I think that you may have overlooked the potential impact on costs. Some of those additional pages would have to carry advertising, so it would not all be allocated to articles and reporting. It would probably also entail the employment of additional staff in order to meet the tight deadlines each week, so there is a further cost here as well as in the production of the additional pages themselves. This would be passed onto us; I think the current cost is 'peanuts' but I know that is not a view shared by everybody, so what impact a further increase? Furthermore, whilst it might address some of the issues that we have, it is unlikely to provide any commercial benefit to Haymarket. And, of course, any 'improvement', real or perceived, won't automatically translate to increased sales since that would only occur if we, the existing readers, spread the word. And, if the tabloid style of the front cover that you referred to took place, it is clear from Andrew's comments that sales would actually decline; sadly it seems that F1 rules and that Hamilton mania currently prevails.

[old man]

Originally Posted by AvdB

Fair comments, although the dsc story couldn't have carried the quotes ours did, especially as our story was published on the day of the meeting.

Poor reporting? I never said such a thing.

I'll take your point on the Ferrari headline and chastise the sub who came up with it!

My point about the report on the LMS GT classes is that this type of racing simply depends on 4 classes to exist, it is the only way to fill the grid and cover the costs. In my experiance G Watkins is a very good reporter but anybody will struggle to know what is going on for 6 hours with 50 cars and 4 classes, I don't know how many staff or feeds you had for that meeting of course. DSC do a very good job but I don't think MC does it alone and they are specialists

My beef is not the reporting but the allocation of space to the reports where I feel they should be given equal coverage so far as possible as each is a race on its own. Sponsors are potential advertisers and I expect that you need at least a 50/50 split between copy and adverts so by reducing the GT1 class to an afterthought you take away the potential for your advertising guys to approach any of the sponsors in that class.

Other contributors to this interesting discussion have their own favourites and that is what gives you the problems, having read through Luke's post I am not sure what his favourite is?

I am unlikely to change the habit of a lifetime Andrew and so thank you for "listening"

[AvdB]

My pleasure.

You'll no doubt enjoy the GT2 feature that's coming in a couple of issues' time.

I take the point about overall report/GT1&2 split, and it's something we'll look into when we go over all the templates during the 'off-season'.

[ss_collins]

Have more insights each week. Have the technial insights of not just F1, but of the prototypes of sports cars etc. New racing cars.

Luke if you really want more tech insights do you really want Autosport - for tech insights Racecar and Race Tech are both better

[luke]

Originally Posted by ss_collins

Luke if you really want more tech insights do you really want Autosport - for tech insights Racecar and Race Tech are both better

Oh I know, I was thinking of an ultimate weekly earlier and just compine Racecar with Autosport. That would be a good mag.

[Dutton]

I have given my thoughts on what AS should be earlier in the thread, thus I won't bother repeating them.

However, AvdB, one recurrent thing I have seen in our discussion with you worries me. You ask us what it is we want/think, as you are really keen to know...we tell you, then you tell us all the reasons you are going to, and should, ignore what we are saying. I realise this has not been the case with every single individual thing ever said in the entire thread...but, generally, IMO, this has been the repeated pattern.

I think the fundamental issue that everyone has is that the overall quality of the reporting/writing/approach has notably declined in recent years. This seems be a pretty universal opinion, but yet has been consistently rebuked by you as basically nonsense.

It is totally fine that you feel this way: you have every right to think what you think just the same as anyone else, but, from a business perspective, if we are more or less universally saying something rather serious but get ignored...

...well, it leads to bad places from a long-term business perspective. I guess this is the problem with the way the business world works: it is all about the short-term. This is not your fault, but it can certainly lead to long-term problems.

[Ian Sowman]

You've got to remember though, Dutton, that readers of these forums - and indeed people posting on this thread - in no way represent an accurate cross-section of Autosport's readership. If AvdB decided to alter Autosport purely on the basis of what people posting here would like to see, I think he'd then have problems on his hands.

[Peter Mallett]

IMO there are good reasons for the changes in the magazine. The FIA has done its best to “dumb down” the sport. As an example I recall the 1988 British GP. Mansell was struggling with the active ride Williams and in Friday practice he was nowhere. Williams were up againt the might of the McLaren Hondas with their turbos whilst the independent Judd engine was in the Williams. Seeing Mansell’s problems, the team took the decision to revert the car to reactive suspension. This involved the manufacture, delivery and installation of these parts before the Saturday warm up, in time for final Qualifying. I don’t recall his qualifying position but in the wet race he finished second to the McLaren of Senna.

The point is that the story of the weekend was not only the race result but the team’s efforts to make the car work. With the current rules we a) don’t have enough practices to find these things out and b) you can’t fundamentally change a car like that anyway. Hence the mags are reduced to talking about the celebs who attend the garages and focus on the aerodynamic tweeks that each team has devized this week. Whoop de do.

Frankly I don’t care whether the addition of half degree of flap has enabled the Spyker to elevate itself from 22nd to 20th. For me its a yawn. This is possibly why Historic racing is becoming more popular with participants and indeed spectators.

It’s not just Formula One. Touring cars with their common gearboxes etc are no longer the cars we want to watch so the organisations rely on politics and gossip to keep us interested. You might call it the “soap opera age”, because half the time we might be reading a technical version of “Hello”. So I mean no disrespect to AvdB and his team, especially Nigel R but I suspect the mag can’t be any different simply because the fayre the FIA serve up is on the whole, pretty ordinary. That said the races themselves are not much different from previous eras but its politics not sport and achievement that get the headlines these days.

[fraggs]

tbh... i've wavered on whether i should cancel my subscription to autosport. I'm tired of the continual love fest over a certain Mr Hamilton. I can just about tolerate it with F1 racing, but for a magazine that I thought was meant to be representative of ALL forms of motorsport... The number of times the front cover just recently has featured either him or McLaren.. I'm just tired of it... Fine if it sells more copies off the shelf for the uninitiated Motorsport lot, but is it really worth alienating the long time supporters of ALL different varieties of motorsport??