Authenticity matters: A digital ethnography of FIA World Rally Championship fan forums

- It is a valuable contribution to an emerging research field.
- It demonstrates how digital ethnography is useful for the study of global sports.
- Findings address the need for the commercial rights holder to engage more directly with the rally fans.

In today's landscape of sport coverage, the increased competition for attention begs the question of how to provide offerings tailor-made not only to people's media consumption patterns, but also to their motivation for following a certain sport. This paper argues that digital ethnography provides a way to analyze views on media coverage of sport that promoters can make use of in attracting new consumers and keeping existing ones. By investigating two online forums where the television coverage of FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) from 2010-2013 was discussed, the most important thing to offer rally fans is not technical perfection and sanitized images, but explicit storytelling elements that are authentic-mirroring 'what rallying is all about.' This approach is believed to be applicable across a range of sports. Therefore as much stress is laid on the methods involved as on the specifics of this example. Along the way, strengths and weaknesses of this approach, these methods and these findings, are discussed.