Help! Journalism Assignment

[kieranlewis]

I am a Journalism student and in order to complete an assignment I need to get an idea of what would make a good motorsport magazine.

So, what works and what doesn't work in current motorsport magazines?

Is there something not being catered for at the moment?

What content would you like to see in a motorsport magazine?

Also, what type of price would you be willing to pay for one and how often would you buy it?

[MrJan]

Oof, tough one. Many car magazines struggle because of the limited readership, most things are usually being catered for but not enough people want to pay good money for them, especially as all the info is available for free on the internet. The news angle is clearly covered by Motoring News and Autosport, the magazine style articles for F1 are well covered too. Therefore you either go for a bit more niche stuff (but by it's very nature you limit the audience, and subsequently the advertising potential) or you go for the magazine/editorial style for other areas of the sport. That will still be a struggle though, about a decade ago there was a rallying magazine called RallyXS (when the WRC was fairly strong in Britain with Colin and Richard at the top), that failed fairly quickly despite having McKlein photograph and a list of quality journos.

Basically, can't help. New print journalism is going to struggle these days, the existing publications are so well entrenched and cover the majority of angles.

[Rudy Tamasz]

Go local. Cover stuff that's happening in your area. Chances are, a lot of local things go unnoticed by major publications.

[Gregor-y]

I do notice articles are much shorter and less written by the author than adapted from a product spec sheet. You can see a big difference in US magazines over the last fifteen years. It's a bit less with the various UK magazines that make it into US stores, but at a used book shop I bought a pile of old Motor Sport magazines from the 1970s and the writing in those is much richer and more personal, even if it isn't always something you could agree with.