New F1 Magazine Help

[Wizzo]

Indeed it is a excellent idea and once again I appreciate everyones help.

Watch this space for more info.

[Alianora La Canta]

Any news, Wiz, about when we're meant to be submitting articles?

[Steven Roy]

I've started an article on all the technology available to us while we watch races.  If the mag isn't ready by the time I finish it I will post it on the forum and start the next one.  Because I have no deadline the article will probably take a while to finish it.

[Wizzo]

Sorry about the lack of news here people. My co-editor and designer seems to be struggling with his already very heavy workload and this has delayed things somewhat.

In a way it's good that this problem has arisen now before any firm commitments have been made, because I can see this problem arising again further down the line. This has made me somewhat sceptical as to the reliability of producing a monthly e-mail magazine.

If I had the time, I would handle this project myself but alas, I do not. Any ideas or suggestions to solve the problem are always welcome.

Again, thank you for everyone's input.

[Wizzo]

Hi all,

I would just like to update this thread for anyone who is interested.

The F1 season is almost upon us once more and the time has just flown by since the concept of an F1 magazine was suggested. You may have guessed by now that this magazine idea will not come to pass before the start of the 2008 season - if at all.

Commitment from the other parties involved has been either non existent or highly unreliable at best, and by this statement I do not include GPWizard members who, as always, rose to the occasion with offers of help and support. I am just glad that I did not commit myself financially or let this idea affect the site in anyway.

Many thanks to you all for your kind words, support and offers of help in writing articles etc. If any of you have written anything or ever want to write for GPWizard then please pass the material onto me and I will gladly post it on the site.

Thanks again

Wiz

[Scott]

Gee Wiz, don't you know that pretty much everyone is an aspiring writer (helluva job - find a nice house on the water with big windows and just type away!)?  Now our dreams are crushed - we could have been discovered and then had 'hard cards' for all the F1 races and able to expense away our luxuries!  Eventually we would have been hired on to an F1 team as its' 'Communications Director' or better yet 'Sponsor Relations'.

Bummer.

[Alianora La Canta]

Sorry that the people at the other end of the publishing chain disappointed you, Wiz, and thanks for keeping us up-to-date.

[cosworth151]

Don't loose hope, Wizzo. There's always next season. The time frame this season was just too short.

Besides, like ScottyD, I'm looking forward to hobnobbing around the Paddock Club at next season's USGP at Indy as your "US Photographic Editor."

You don't think I'm being a wee bit optomistic, do you?

[Chameleon]

Scotty: It's a nice dream but the reality is more along the lines of "starving artist in a garret".

A few thoughts on the magazine idea:

I think an emailed product is the wrong way to go.  Someone else is trying it (forget the name - shows how interested I am) except on a weekly basis.  It's just not immediate enough for net-savvy readers.  I am subscribed to various newsletters on F1 sites and, quite frankly, I do no more than glance at them - they cannot help but be out of date if you read the F1 sites every day.  A monthly would have to forget news and provide excellent and authoritative background info (not impossible but requires careful selection of contributors) and even then would only appeal to the total fanatics.  That's a limited audience within a limited audience - hard to make that pay.

Online F1 fans are used to being spoiled.  They expect to have the news delivered as it happens and they know their stuff so aren't easily fobbed off with the wafer-thin background info supplied by some sites (mostly the newspaper sites).  They have their favourite sites bookmarked and are not easily persuaded to add to their list.  It's a tough market.

I suppose I ought to be plugging F1-Pitlane here, especially as some of you write for it already, but I don't want to step on the Wizard's toes.  Instead, let me say that there is room for fresh thinking on the presentation of F1 on the net and F1-Pitlane is working towards it.  What I have noticed in running F1 blogs is that many of them function as forums, although they do not have forum pretensions.  It may be that we will see a merger of the two approaches in the future - something that is necessary, in my view, since forum people tend not to be blog people and vice versa.  It is something that GP Wizard and F1 Pitlane need to be thinking about - how to persuade both cultures into a single format.

But I'm fairly certain that email is not immediate enough to be the way forward.