Notebook: Haymarket Publishing Race Fan Survey

Today I received an e-mail from Haymarket Publishing asking me to take their survey about motorsports television coverage. Here’s the link if you’d like to take it yourself:

Haymarket Race Fan Survey

In case you don’t already know, Haymarket is a huge publishing company based in the UK that publishes magazines such as Racer, Autosport, Motor Sport, F1 Racing, and many others. They also own LAT Photographic, one the largest motorsports photography archives in the world. Look at the photo credits in any issue of Racer magazine and you’ll see that a large number of them come from LAT.

The survey was very basic and only took a minute or so to complete. It’s a little hard to tell how they will turn such generic data into actionable business intelligence, but that’s up to them.

At the very end of the survey, they mention that TheRacingNetwork.com is coming soon. Hmmmm… what does that mean? Whatever it is, if it’s really a new television network it better show lots of racing (and by that I mean RACING, not fluff pieces about the pets of NASCAR mechanics or any of that garbage). Of course, it should be on cable and it should also be free!

You never know how things like this will turn out, but Haymarket probably has the bucks to be serious, and as an international company with established, high-quality publications already, we can only hope that they will avoid the NASCAR tunnel vision of other media companies.