Funny how the gossip became the business model

When the "distraction" was always the point and they finally show up to the party.

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I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator and the Editor-At-Large at Esses Magazine. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past six years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, culture and technology of motorsports.

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⏳ Reading time: 5 minutes

There is a particular kind of intellectual dishonesty that sports media has never been asked to account for. It’s not unique to the media landscape, nor is it more obvious in sports, but it is something I’ve been watching closely for the past 6+ years. This is one of those opinions where I am unapologetically a broken record on.

It goes like this: a woman covers something true and interesting about sport - the fashion, the relationships, the business, the culture, the politics or even the human beings who orbit the product - and she is told, in some combination of words or silence, that she is not ‘that’ serious. That she does not understand the sport. That what she is producing is gossip, distraction, noise. And then, some years later, like clockwork, the same outlet, the same broadcaster, the same commentator, discovers that there is an audience for exactly that content, and they begin producing it as though they invented it. No attribution. No acknowledgement. No apology.

This is not a conspiracy. It doesn’t need to be. In sports, it is simply the predictable arc of an industry that has always calibrated its editorial compass against a single question: where is the money? Yet has somehow been blind to the fact that a lot of the money lies with women and young female fans.

My issue is that the existing media landscape is repainting all teh above as innovative content, serious content that explains the power dynamics and business of the sports, as if we didn’t already know this. The content was always there. The audience was always there. Fans had been flagging for years that mainstream media didn't understand them or provide the coverage they actually wanted - so women built it themselves, out of necessity, at their own expense, absorbing the backlash. And now that the numbers are undeniable - Deloitte projects women's elite sport will generate over $1 billion in global revenue, and new records are being broken every season across women's leagues - the institutions that dismissed us have simply repainted the door and called it innovation. It’s predictable. It’s lazy. It’s boring. And the simple reality is it won’t work because the passion and intellectual curiosity are missing.

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Before we dive in further, this is the same gripe I have with male motocross content creators who jump on the bandwagon of being advocates and allies championing for more female representation in sport solely to make content that gets them views, but disappear and stay silent when they actually have to defend their position and fight the inevitable comment section.

In motorsport - my current beat - the pattern is almost comically legible. For decades, the paddock was covered as though the 20 cars (now 22) and the 20 drivers (now 22) were a sealed ecosystem, hermetically protected from anything so vulgar as personality or lifestyle. Sir Lewis Hamilton was possibly one of the first to break that seal. Women in the sport were either grid girls - a function - or WAGs - a distraction. Female journalists who showed up to cover something other than lap times were treated with a kind of tolerant condescension that, if you haven’t experienced it, is difficult to describe precisely: not hostile enough to name, corrosive enough to accumulate. I myself have experienced insults so faint that you might almost mistake them for compliments.

Formula 1 has now become a global lifestyle brand. Just this past weekend in Miami, we watched as Formula 1 cosplayed as a lifestyle brand and platform. Drive to Survive, which debuted in 2019, did not change the sport. It changed the lens - and in doing so, it made visible an audience that had been there all along. A younger audience. A predominantly female-skewing audience. It was teh spark that was needed for discussions to brew online and for communities to be created. Conversations about the drama, the relationships, the aesthetics, the human stakes…. exactly what women had been covering, and being laughed at for covering, for years.

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This is where the hypocrisy becomes structural rather than individual. Less than 10% of sports articles are still written by women, even as the content those articles cover increasingly mirrors what women have been producing independently for years. The women who built those audiences - often at personal cost, absorbing the online abuse, the lack of credentials, the institutional scepticism - did not suddenly find themselves elevated when the market validated their instincts. What happened instead is that larger organisations recognised the demand, staffed up (often not with women), and absorbed the category. The online trolling, the lack of resources, the financial precarity of creating independent platforms to serve underrepresented audiences - all of that cost was borne disproportionately by the women (and more often than not, by Black women) who pioneered the space.

The industry’s response was not to examine its own history. It was to sprint toward the revenue. Media coverage for women’s sports reached 15% in 2024, and new networks and platforms dedicated to previously ignored audiences are rapidly expanding. Think Sportish - with the tagline, not your boyfriend’s sports news, which has unapologetically been covering sports the way young women talk about sports and has amassed a large following on social platforms. Or even the 400 Club, co-founded by Cherry Beagles and Morgan Riddle, with a desire to empower women in sports. Or even my own Sunday Fangirls - the Untapped Billion to reclaim the word ‘fangirls’ which has been used for decades to ridicule and silence young female fans.

The lifestyle angle, the culture angle, the WAG coverage that was once relegated to guilty-pleasure blogs, is now a staple of mainstream sports publications, complete with paddock fashion round-ups, driver dating trackers, and content that would have been dismissed as insufficiently serious a decade ago. The framing has changed. The bylines, by and large, have not.

I want to be precise about what I am arguing, because the lazy counterargument is that any coverage is progress, and that women should be glad the content exists at all. I reject that framing entirely. The question is not whether the content exists. The question is who gets credited, who gets paid, and who gets to sit at the table once the table becomes valuable. Right now, the answer to all three is: not the people who set it.

There is also a more insidious version of this story, which is the tone shift. The content that was characterised as gossip when women produced it is now framed as cultural analysis when mainstream outlets pick it up. And by the way, it’s mostly women who’ll understand the deep importance of gossip as a means of protection. The same observation about a driver’s girlfriend’s fashion influence - written by a female creator in 2019 and dismissed as fandom rather than journalism - becomes a considered piece on F1’s brand evolution when it appears in a mainstream sports supplement in 2026.

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What I know, from six years of doing this, is that being early and being female in sports media is not the same as being wrong. It is just the same as being ignored until the spreadsheet catches up. The audience that mainstream sports media is now courting - younger, more diverse, more interested in the full human texture of sport than in technical minutiae alone - was never absent. It was undeserved. And the people who underserved it, who told us to keep politics out of sport and the WAGs off the broadcast and the fashion off the page, did not change their minds because they were persuaded. They changed their metrics because the money moved.

But the reality is that it won’t work for them because it lacks the real passion that creators and fans (and women) have brought to the table when it comes to these topics and lacks intellectual rigour that most traditional outlets seem to skip when it comes to these topics. After all, they are just following the money. They aren’t actually interested in the topics. Listen to Johnny Harris talk about exactly this - “The secret is that you can’t be a top-down corporation spending lots of money trying to crack the code…”