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Atom Today's entry is going to be a relatively short one (cue relief from LCMB's readers ;) )
Before I found out about the F1 blogosphere, or even the F1 fora, I used to use Yahoo! Sport's portal to keep up-to-date with the news. Even afterwards, it was good for brief checks of what the hot topics were before plunging into the detail stuff from sources who were more detailed/closer to the truth/more opinionated [delete/augment as appropriate]. It's been a while since I've done that - Twitter more or less took over the role of telling me what the hot topics were at a given time - but this afternoon I wandered back to Yahoo! Sport for nostalgia's sake.
I was disappointed at what I saw.
The fact that it's a news portal, rather than a direct source of news, meant I was unsurprised with the... ...variable quality of sources used. It was the lack of quality control that truly got to me.
Take this example. The headline indicates it's a rumour, but such efforts to distinguish the type of item are the extent of its strengths. The story is attributed to F1 news site Crash.net in the top-right of the article, Spanish daily sports newspaper Diario AS in the middle of the article and the distinct impression that GMM is involved at some point as a middlesite. The Diario AS article which appears to have started all this is much longer than the versions at Yahoo! and Crash, and the style of abbreviation has all the hallmarks of GMM on it.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the GMM controversy, it is an information-trawling agency that charges money to send metric tonnes of small items of varying levels of veracity, frequently using an online translation service to help make its quota (currently 8-25, but changing every so often). It's the F1 data equivalent of fast food - some like its convenience but many consider the lack of value-added information, rumour quotient, lack of indicated differential between types of item and certain other of its actions unhealthy. Whatever your opinion of GMM, it is proper etiquette for a site to mention a site if used as a middlesite. Proper "breadcrumbing" of information sourcing enables people to find out by what process the information has arrived and what changes may have been made to it along the trail.
Making matters worse is the lack of care in the sentences. This carelessness has been imported from Crash.net, but that is no excuse. Why is "newspaper" abbreviated with an apostrophe when the correct abbreviation doesn't have one? Why have online translator artefacts such as "the Collins" been left? They act merely as symbolic eyesores and serve no useful purpose.
Worse still are such confusing suggestions as "Tonio Liuzzi's management has made contract with Hispania Racing" when the headline itself suggests the two sides are merely in talks. The offending sentence is the very first one in the article. What, exactly, is a reader unaware of the true situation meant to make of this? They might think something's been signed, they might not - but they will think the reportage was rather clueless. Not great for a site that presumably expects people to come back and read more of its articles.
It is a relief to me that the F1 blogosphere and reputable journalists like Joe Saward have taken over as the primary sources of F1 internet information exchange because if they hadn't, computer-using F1 fans would be banging their heads on the wall in frustration every time they logged on.
PS. If I have made any blatent blatant spelling or basic sentence construction mistakes in this entry, feel free to point and laugh at the irony ;) .