JC / Railbird

I was wondering what the hell was wrong with my computer/connection.
Funny how these things make it to the editing floor…

Posted by winston on November 11, 2008 @ 11:26 am

I’m sorry, Jessica, but this is a really bad cup of coffee you are serving today. The Haskin post — the one up there right now — is a terrific, deeply considered analysis. Everything about it is quality except the unfortunate “Presented by Yum Brands!” tag BH and TT insist on using, even though they’re not paid (or are they?) to say it. When an enterprise like the Blood-Horse builds itself from nothing into something across a span of years, invests its money in upping its quality so it can deliver a first-rate look into the world of horse racing, it does not deserve to be denigrated in this manner. I don’t care what it says in “Here Comes Everybody” or what tweets and twitters burble up from the bubbling Internet stew. Publications like Blood-Horse are not perfect, but they take pride in what they publish and the professionalism that goes into that. It is a great magazine. They also have responsibilities that little blogs do not. Removing the word “obscene” is a perfectly acceptable editorial decision when considering Haskin’s story on the sheikh. I don’t know the thinking behind the decision, but editors make calls like that every single day in the publishing world, and they are professional decisions.

I would ask this: Did it fundamentally alter, in any way, the nature or context of the story? I’d say no. Did Haskin still get to make his points? Yes. The piece should be classified as an analysis more than an opinion column and the word “obscene” does not enhance it. Haskin might think it did, but the editor did not. That’s a call to be made in the office. For you to take that and extrapolate it into an indictment of the profession of turf writers at large mainstream publications, and presume the bloggers and fan committees are somehow purer and better suited to cover horse racing going forward to me is insulting and foolish. The country will rue the day its great newsgathering organizations are completely dismantled. On many levels, they are vital to a functioning society, from their watchdog role, to their deliberate rules-based vetting and publishing of information. Decentralization, like centralization and consolidation, is not a good thing if carried to its extremes. I am not a fan of the Tower of Babel. A good news agency works as the eyes and mouthpiece of the people. It is a critical function because its reporters are entrusted to do the interviews with the subjects, gather the facts, vet the findings properly, with the guidance of editors, and report back to the people. The people, if they like, can reject this, but they do so at the risk of diminished knowledge. Here comes everybody does not mean everybody knows everything. In a filter-free communications environment, slander, libel, rumor and falsehood easily gain currency. There is a strong need for an Internet, blog-based “commentariat,” — such as the Thoroughbred Bloggers Alliance — because it not only gives voice to a wider band of opinion, but adds to the richer fabric of the conversation by expanding the context (the way Brooklynbackstretch does with her historical pieces) but that same “commentariat” should embrace the deliberately built news gathering companies and consider them their agents, while continuing to hold them to high standards. The Blood-Horse has the capability of providing news, analysis, opinion and numerical data on horse racing from around the world. It is an enterprise with in-house checks and balances, such as editors and possibly an ombudsmen. It publishes letters to the editor. It takes its mission and trust seriously – it is are working for you.

These are exciting and worrisome times, with exploding forms of commuication deploying so fast, we have only begun to digest the ramifications when a new one comes along. Plenty of rah rah on both sides, but no one can pretend to really know where we’re going and whether it’s going to be a good place. I suggest showing more respect for “traditional” media that has served us so well for so long until we do.

Posted by John S. on November 11, 2008 @ 12:10 pm

After more than four years and 1800 posts, I suppose it was inevitable I’d serve a really bad cup of coffee eventually, although there are several points here on which we disagree.

A couple quibbles: One, the Blood-Horse is not working for me or the public. It is owned by the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association. It is a trade publication, its audience is the breeding and racing industry and the advertisers that support it, and while BH does produce an incredible stream of well-reported racing and industry news and much thoughtful analysis (and I do visit the site daily just for all that and even subscribed to the print edition for a while), it is necessarily limited in its coverage and in how far its writers can go in their commentary. Two: You’re getting a little hung up on the edit I used as an example (because it was documentable, by the way, and not reliant on my memory of what I read or some meaningless abstraction).

As for showing respect to traditional media, I’ve spent my entire career in journalism and publishing. I’ve been a reporter, an editor, a producer. I was among the last generation of journalists trained pre-Internet age, and you know what it’s been like since I entered the workforce back when print still had it good? I’m sure you do — because you’re also in media. Every year, accelerating decline. Profits and advertising revenues down. More pages cut. More jobs eliminated. Salaries stagnant or shrinking, supplemented by a lot of freelance, until it’s all freelance. Digital departments get beefed up with “content creators,” editors are considered superfluous. Suit-wearing drones natter on about “monetization” and no one can figure out how to make the transition from print-based to web-based work, largely because the people in charge rely on some misguided assumptions (such as new business models have to provide the same profit margins as the old and that newsprint = journalism) as they ponder how to avoid bankruptcy.

This is hardly a moment to genuflect before tradition, when the information monopoly once enjoyed by the mainstream media is fast crumbling and we — and by that, I mean the public — are suffering from a diminishment of our great newsgathering organizations and losing out on valuable, necessary knowledge and context, not from blogs or Twitter or the Tower of Babel, but from executives and turf-guardians who continue to see themselves as protectors of a top-down, hierarchical broadcast system of information dissemination and struggle against technology’s disruptive power.

Posted by Jessica on November 11, 2008 @ 1:37 pm

I wasn’t genuflecting before tradition, I was making a case for well-run, muscular, capitalized news organizations.

Granted, TOBA owns the Blood-Horse. Good point.

To your third graph: I think the “people in charge” have abdicated their responsibilities, their trusts. I think the wrong people, clearly, are in charge (see Tribune Co. for a perfect example).

Fourth, there was no news and analysis monopoly, ever. There has always been competition.

Finally, I will contend that a top-down, hierarchical broadcast system is the right model in a competitive environment. Technology’s disruptive power is dismantling critical societal organizations of information and trust. This is not a good thing.

Posted by John S. on November 11, 2008 @ 2:04 pm

“Fourth, there was no news and analysis monopoly, ever. There has always been competition.”

Competition has always existed between news organizations — the monopoly referred to was primarily that of the mainstream media. Now competition exists among news organizations, start-ups, bloggers, curious members of the public, anyone who feels like becoming a publisher. And here I’ll confess something: I’m not such a radical that the low entry barrier to publishing these days doesn’t also freak me out a little. Dave Winer recently wrote about creating an open-source news platform to which citizen-journalists would contribute and gatekeepers would wither away. That might be going too far.

At the same time, what it means to be a well-run, trustworthy, capitalized newsgathering operation has changed, as has what readers expect.

One of the most interesting stories to come out of the presidential election was the success of the political news sites Politico and TPM and the polling data site FiveThirtyEight, which is built on Blogger and run by three guys. All attracted millions of readers — reported traffic numbers were equal to or better than several newspaper sites — and FiveThirtyEight’s statistical model was so spot-on the only state it erred in calling was Indiana.

That’s what keeps me from fretting too much about the dismantling of critical societal organizations of information: The fact that anyone can publish or blog or tweet, but not everyone will be trusted. For that, your site or organization has to prove itself by reliably providing useful and credible information or analysis. Plenty of others posted polling data, but FiveThirtyEight was transparent about everything from its process to its founder’s political leanings to the software employed, and because of that and the quality of the work, the site became a must for poll-watchers through the fall. The information market is actually pretty efficient at floating the best sites in a niche to the top.

One other thing — I think we’re entering an era of aggregation and consolidation in online content. Readers show a high level of engagement with sites that have editorial sensibilities they trust and point them to or provide them with consistently interesting content. The editors are about to return. Anyone will still be able to publish, but attracting more than a marginal audience will increasingly mean starting out well-capitalized and professional (The Daily Beast is a harbinger) or being able to quickly build your site up to that level.

Posted by Jessica on November 11, 2008 @ 4:16 pm

Interesting points on both sides here. FiveThirtyEight already had a track record. Nate Silver and the BP guys pretty much have revolutionized baseball statistics and what they mean. If you had read BP for as many years as I had (you could take their word to the bank, literally, if you bet baseball), you would instantly know that whatever they were doing at FiveThirtyEight was going to be good (and most likely correct in their prediction). Horse racing needs more people like Nate Silver…oopppsss…I forgot, that can’t happen in the proprietary nature that horse racing guards its statistics.

Posted by o_crunk on November 11, 2008 @ 6:10 pm

To date, those statistics are public, for a fee. What is keeping anyone, say Minor, from putting together an organization and compiling their own statistics from here on out and making them accessible?

Posted by winston on November 11, 2008 @ 10:03 pm

Here’s hoping Halsey Minor gets the google alert and puts that idea on his to do list! That would be amazing not to mention likely to do more good for the game in the long run than saving a track or two.

Posted by dana on November 12, 2008 @ 12:40 pm

I would love to get someone like Nate Silver involved in racing, but you’re right, that’s tough to make happen in the current environment.

Which reminds me of a comment thread from earlier in the year, on a post about the court ruling that freed MLB data for fantasy play.

Winston, have you read “Betting on Myself” by Steve Crist? Awesome book, and one of my favorite sections is about the start of the Racing Times, in which Crist recounts doing exactly what you propose — compiling data taken from old DRFs and then taking part in the founding of Equibase (which was, crazy as this sounds now, once the data upstart in the industry). Someone could do that again … Halsey, email me, I’ve already written the business plan.

4:00 p.m. addition: Getting back to the journalism debate, Ron “Old Media” Rosenbaum and Jeff “New Media” Jarvis are carrying on an argument similar to the one above (but with a lot more bitterness and name calling than went on here). 11/16 postscript: Jarvis v. Rosenbaum summed up.

Posted by Jessica on November 12, 2008 @ 12:51 pm

And here I thought, for once, I was ahead of the curve.

Never got around to reading Crist. Sounds like I might have to move it up a stack or two. Thanks.

Posted by winston on November 12, 2008 @ 9:19 pm

Jessica, why don’t you just call Halsey?

Posted by John S. on November 14, 2008 @ 10:13 am