JC / Railbird

Love the links…

The Times piece certainly highlighted the harsh reality encountered by formerly mainstream sports. After reading the piece, I Googled “Boxing blogs” and discovered the bizarroland of fans providing coverage on the sport. As someone with no interest in boxing, I now understand what my non-equine enthused friends must think (or simply cannot relate to) of my website.

Brilliant as always. Keep ’em coming!

Posted by Keith - Triple Dead Heat on October 30, 2009 @ 4:34 pm

Newspaper sports editors are NO FUN anymore. They are middling bean counters, not inspired risk-takers willing to turn loose a writer on a story with offbeat flair and power. Boxing and horse racing are among the very best sports for writers because they are so free-wheeling. Football, baseball, basketball — these sports are tightly controlled by the leagues intent on controlling spin and news flow. You get press conferences way more than you get to spend time with the athletes. It’s largely canned and the beat writer develops some bogus storyline arc for the season for his/her team and a lid is kept on the dirt so the same beat writer doesn’t get frozen out by the team a third of the way through an interminable season for writing something inflammatory. Play nice with the boys, beat writer.
In racing and boxing, you just go to the barn or the training camp with your credential and — boom! — you’re in talking to D. Wayne Lukas or Miguel Cotto. And you write the dirt, if you dig for it, because there is no team to stonewall you. Everybody is their own team!
If you’ve not seen the new design of The Washington Post, it is not a pretty sight. It looks like they’ve merged with Farmer’s Almanac or some cheese Americana rag like that. And if the paper’s once-lofty standards were barbecued ribs, I would describe them as falling off the bone, and I don’t mean that in a complimentary way. I actually think the New York Times is just about the last man standing, from the paper’s I’ve seen, and, yes, I still wish they’d cover more boxing and racing. For the latter, it’s year-round in their state, and it deserves a regular beat. I am sick and tired of newspaper editors croaking on and on about how it’s a new landscape and we are adapting to a changing world and blah blah blah. The fact of the matter is newspapers have abandoned their core readers by cutting what they want and came to expect. At The Washington Post, for example, they’ve trimmed the movie clock (it’s a paid clock). If you can’t go to the newspaper to find out what time the movie starts, what is the point? You can’t find the daily racing entries. You can’t find the concert reviews anymore. You can’t find anything but AP foreign news. You can’t find in-depth state and local government reporting. You can’t find anything the way you always used to like it. The newspapers let go all the writers and then hire a fucking guru for a few million bucks to redesign the paper. Newspapers should virtually never redesign because readers make a bond with the familiarity and reliability of the thing every day: It looks like this and it brings you the news. The redesign does nothing but attempt to justify the guru’s existence and pay and the reader says, “Not only is everything I liked to read in this paper getting cut out, but it doesn’t even look like my paper anymore.” And you want to blame the circ drops on the Internet? I don’t think that’s any more than part of the reason. Newspapers have abdicated the trust they developed with their readers and they gave up the one ace in the hole they held over everyone: massed content. Larry Merchant is core readership of the New York Times. Why can’t he read about boxing in there?
Here’s a novel thought: Racing fares best when live days are cut and meets are shortened. Quality goes up and people look forward to the Keeneland and Saratoga meets because they feel special. Newspapers, instead of cutting staff, should cut days. Come out five days a week or six instead of seven. The money saved could be plowed back into editorial. Quality would theoretically go up. It’s getting late. Class dismissed.

Posted by John S. on November 1, 2009 @ 11:21 pm

Well said, John S.! You are one writer to which “tl;dr” never applies.

Posted by EJXD2 on November 2, 2009 @ 8:04 am