Unorthodox pursuit of a dream career - The David Malsher story (Part I)
Englishman David Malsher doesn’t mince his words when he declares that as the editor of the US-based RACER magazine, he has the best job in the world.
Despite the abnormally long hours the 40-year-old Englishman puts in each week at his Irvine, California office – 60kms south-west of Los Angeles – it’s a job that he has dreamt of doing since he was barely a teenager.
“I believe that it was Christmas 1983 when I received a book as a present titled ‘Grand Prix Greats’ by Nigel Roebuck,” Malsher recalled.
“I had been interested in the sport of motor racing for as long as I could remember and I found Roebuck’s style of writing was simply captivating, mainly because it was about the drivers who utilised cars to express their art, rather than the sort of book that talks technicalities about cars that carry a driver to success.“His view tallied with mine and his writing was elegant without getting lost in its own self-importance, and he covered the historical figures too. There are still, even to this day, passages in that book that give me goose bumps every time I read it. Even back then at the tender age of 13, I had already considered myself too old - and my financial backing too non-existent - to be a race car driver, so writing about them was the only alternative.”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing for the ‘would-be’ motorsport journalist. Having left school at the impressionable age of 18, Malsher quickly learnt that his grades to get into his chosen course of Media and Communications Studies at Leeds University were not up to the entry-level standard.
“To be honest I was a bit of a loss, but what spurred me into action was when my parents threatened to put me through my final year of school again,” Malsher conceded.
“At that stage I just decided to take any course in order to achieve any degree, so I went to Birmingham Polytechnic (now known as the University of Central England) to study Hotel and Catering Management. It wasn’t a course that ‘jumped out and grabbed me’, but I followed it anyway to avoid the indignity of my parent’s threat in repeating and joining the kids in the year below.
“To cut a long story short, the only hotels I wanted anything to do with were the ones that I planned on staying in when I attended motorsport events.”
At the insistence of his parents, and amidst further threats of having to return to school, the-then 19-year-old signed up for a secretarial course at the London School of Publishing. Combining the secretarial course with evening studies in Magazine Editing, Malsher achieved some impressive results.
“For the first, and last, time in my life, I was top of a class, and if that ultimately meant nothing, it was an ego-boost and convinced my parents that I wasn’t just a dreamer,” he boasted.
“The shock of being thrown out of Uni - trust me, it had been no shock – was in retrospect a much-needed kick up the butt. I had no money of my own, having blown it all in my six months at Uni, so I was relying on my parents’ bank account when I passed the entrance exam for a journalism course at the London College of Printing.”
Still, Malsher’s unorthodox path to respectable journalist and editor was far from resolved. His impressive scoring in the entrance test held him steadfast in the top 2% of those accepted into the journalism syllabus. But it was his complete incomprehension of law studies (essential to the completion of the journalism program) that led to his initial struggles with the curriculum.
A defining moment in Malsher’s career path arrived during the year-long course when the opportunity for a mandatory work experience placement at a local publication, Autosport magazine, part of Haymarket Publishing, arose.
“At the end of my two weeks at Autosport, I was basically told by the editor that if I went back and passed my law exams then I was welcome to come back and do a three-month trial period,” he explained.“With the added incentive of a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, I remarkably began to comprehend the previously incomprehensible nature of media law and promptly passed all of my outstanding exams.
Malsher returned to Autosport magazine and became the deputy editor of their Special Projects division, a task, amongst others, that involved working on the official Formula 1 programs that are sold at each of the Grand Prix races around the world.
“During this time I was so eager, I was like a dog with two dicks for about 9 months - at which point I was let go,” he lamented.
“The division was being reduced, I was the last in so the first out, and I hadn’t ingratiated myself with all the right people because I was an arrogant prick.”
It took Malsher nine LONG months before he found a job with another publishing company, where he spent the next four years working on a series of identical contracts to those he had been working on at Haymarket.
As with most things that he had attempted in his life to that point, Malsher eventually became bored and frustrated with the circumstances surrounding his existence, so he entertained the idea of a job change and applied for a position as a managing editor at a small publication titled, Motor Sport Historian Magazine - which at that point was owned by his former employer, Haymarket.
“I figured if they [Haymarket] could let bygones be bygones, then so could I,” Malsher rationalised.
“So I responded and got the job, and three and a half years later I completed the full-circle when I was transferred back to Autosport magazine as the deputy editor. Then, within a short frame of time, my ideal job became vacant – ‘Autosport magazine’s reporter of the US open-wheel racing scene’ – needless to say that I leapt at it.”
A year into juggling both the deputy editor and reporter roles, Malsher was given a choice of either remaining with the magazine as the deputy editor or to continue reporting, albeit, the latter in a revamped role as a freelancer.
According to Malsher, he hated the management in place at the time, but LOVED the reporting side of the job. In reflection, he concedes that it was an easy decision for him to enter the world of freelance journalism - despite the relative financial risk associated with the move.
At the end of 2007, RACER magazine, another Haymarket publication, contacted Malsher to see if he was still interested in moving to the US - an idea he had entertained since the age of 18, and one that he had been ‘peddling’ to the ‘powers-that-be’ since his days as a junior editor. Racer magazine wanted to know if Malsher was interested in the role of editor at their Southern California head office!
“It was a ‘no-brainer’ so I did and I still do – only these days I’m like a dog with five dicks,” Malsher bragged cheekily.
In Part 2 of our profile on the highly-respected motorsport journalist and editor, David Malsher, we’ll learn what it takes to run one of North America’s premier motorsport magazines.
