Imagining the Story

Abstract

The first promotional arena of the WRC is the media. In the previous chapter, we learned that International Sportsworld Communicators/North One Sport (ISC/NOS) had partial success in meeting one of the general challenges, that of striking a balance between past and the present of the World Rally Championship in the promotional culture that emerged in the 1990s. In this chapter, I therefore first turn to WRC TV, the production unit of North One Sport, as it was the championship’s ‘key media agent’ in 2010 (see Võsu, Kõresaar and Kuutma, 2008, p. 249), to investigate the issue further. Although much ink has been spilt in hyping up the ‘YouTube generation’, there are several reasons to why an official media producer is still important. The first is the sheer scale of the operation, which I will come back to below, which no amateur can compete with. The second is that, travelling the world along with the championship, they bring coherence to it, something that is impossible with user-generated content due to its fragmented nature. The third reason is that only an official producer (or similar specialist network) has the skills to ‘create narrative pleasures’ from playing director with uncertain variables, their conditional elements and incidental moments (Boyle and Haynes, 2009, p. 77).