Staff Writer London 2024

Formula 1 is looking to recruit a creative, ambitious Staff Writer to join our in-house editorial team working on the evolving Formula1 App & Website. This is an exciting opportunity for the right candidate to join our high output team, in order to create written content that will reach millions of F1 fans around the world, and include extending the narratives to engage new and diverse fan groups, aligned with optimizing the way fans engage with editorial.

The ideal candidate well be a highly-motivated and skilled creator, comfortable creating ground-breaking engagement formats, as well as writing short news stories, interviewing F1 drivers for long-form feature, and with a strong editorial eye and talent for seeking out compelling stories. Previous editorial and analytics experience is needed and a background in sports journalism – and, of course, knowledge of F1 would be an added bonus.

Main duties & responsibilities

Writing

• Responsible for sourcing, researching and writing stories and assets to deadline for F1.com and app, including news, race and session reports, video articles and features, plus new items for driving up fan engagement
• Ghost writing columns for key contributors when required
• Occasional travel to testing/races to carry out writing duties as a representative of Formula1.com
• Taking ownership of key editorial feature pillars, and optimization of format engagement for digital fans, aligned with the web & app platform development team and integrated content tools
• Writing editorial to support key business objectives

Editing and publishing

• Sub-editing and publishing other writers’ copy
• Inputting copy from other writers into CMS
• Carrying out basic editing of artwork/photography for editorial use
• Ability to support integration of data into editorial assets and inject aligned editorial
• Fact-checking and providing editorial assistance to other departments within F1 (e.g. marketing, communications) when required
• Using analytics tools, and feedback from internal analysis teams and agencies to review and seek improvements to written content, to help make our output more engaging for fans

Website curation

• Curating homepage/hubs are content areas when required, ensuring a strong editorial angle, variety of content and optimizing engagement
• Planned assistance with select weekend publishing duties

Production & ideation

• Contributing ideas, treatments and appropriate format concepts for editorial content, aligned with written and video, plus social and audio
• Assisting with script writing and QC-ing when required by video team
• At track, occasional video work, including post-session interviews
• Baseline capability to help organise editorial projects

About you

• Degree-educated, equivalent or relevant editorial experience, preferably in Digital
• Accomplished writer with proven journalistic skills and strong ‘news nose’
• Strong knowledge and understanding of F1, both current and historical
• As comfortable with long-form writing as producing short-form, accurate and polished newswriting and engaging feature pieces
• Strong ideation skills
• Sound news judgement, with ability to take into account target audience, tone of voice and commercial/political considerations
• Outstanding communication and organisational skills
• Experience of web authoring tools, SEO and software: CMS, Adobe Experience Manager, Photoshop, FTP clients, PC operating systems
• Strong eye for detail and good sub-editing skills
• Eye for detail and an analytical, self-critical attitude to work
• Self-motivated and hard working
• Good team player