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Media Archive

The Arc Is True

The Baltimore Sun talks with William Nack about “Secretariat,” the movie:

Last month, over the phone from his home in Chevy Chase, he said that “the arc of the movie is accurate. Penny took over the horse farm when her father was dying, and left her family and went East to run the career of this racehorse. It made her and her husband estranged; she had a very difficult time. But she managed to start another life. She ended up blending in well with the Establishment, and she was much admired. That is the guts of the movie — and it’s all true.”

Beyond that, Nack said, [director Randall Wallace] got the pastoral and the prickly textures right.

A neat elision, on Nack’s part, re: the details that maybe aren’t so accurate.

Posted in Media on September 11, 2010 / Tagged Artistic License, Details, Disney, Movies, Narratives, Secretariat, Truth in Art, William Nack

Through the Cracks

Jay Hovdey on how exchange wagering came to pass in California:

… the exchange betting portion was tucked into the bill in mid-August, allowing precious little time for public debate on the merits.

Not so, says the California Horse Racing Board’s executive secretary, Kirk Breed, who points out that exchange betting was discussed at every meeting of the racing board’s Legislative Committee since last March …

For the most part, those committee meetings were undercovered by media and therefore not part of the mainstream conversation in California racing circles. The concept of legalizing betting exchanges was broached only a couple of times at the regular monthly meetings of the state racing board held this year, and then never as an agenda item for formal discussion.

And now it is law. Is this a great country or what?

An example of what gets lost without a robust, independent press, whether professional or amateur, beat reporters or obsessive bloggers …

Posted in Media on September 2, 2010

Vic Ziegel, RIP

The 72-year-old sportswriter died Friday:

… and the only one who could lighten such dark and heavy news would have been Ziegel himself.

Nobody had a more deft touch with written words or humor than Ziegel, The News columnist and former sports editor, who spent his life making readers smile or chuckle over the one-liners he so painstakingly crafted.

I can’t remember ever reading a bad Ziegel column. He could do humor without snark, criticism without condescension. Even covering the biggest racing days, when every little detail that could be reported seemed to have been so, his words always sounded fresh, his stories always new.

“It astounded my father — a man who rode with the Cossacks; the friendlier Cossacks — that a son of his earned a living writing 24-21, 4-3, $12.60 to win,” Ziegel once wrote of his career. “The truth? It still astounds his son.”

7/27/10 Addendum: Allen Barra remembers Ziegel. “But at a particular time, hell, there were times when I think I was the best.” No question.

Posted in Media on July 24, 2010 / Tagged New York, New York Daily News, RIP, Turf Writers, Vic Ziegel, Writers

New Look for DRF

Back in May, I posted screenshots of an in-progress DRF.com redesign. Just in time for the summer meets, the new look is now live on the site*:

A few quick impressions:

Of positive note is the play-the-races module, a dashboard for the day’s racing action, which will be customizable at some point in the future, writes Steven Crist, although I do miss seeing headlines in that space above the fold. Depth of reporting is one of DRF’s strengths and I hate to see it downplayed on the homepage. The “News Center,” however, is so well laid out it makes a fine alterna-home for visitors more interested in headlines. But no RSS still? With the site built in Drupal, that’s a little surprising.

The flyout menus on the main navigation bar are nicely done, neatly handling the problem of having so much information to display.

The “Learn” and “How To” tabs of the earlier draft have been combined into one, “Learn,” which displays links to an uneven mix of educational and customer acquisition content. I do like that the Keeneland DRF archive gets some good space on the “Horse Racing History” page.

It’s not unusual to take a redesign live with a list of things to tweak, but there are aspects of the new look that are less polished than might be expected, such as the awkward spacing and empty areas of the header, footer, and certain in-page elements, and the spots of funky typography, particularly on the homepage. Maybe those items will be addressed in progressive iterations.

*1:00 PM Update: Rather, it was live, for about an hour this morning. The old look has returned. So, was the launch buggy? Or premature? [Buggy, I hear.]

Posted in Media on July 20, 2010 / Tagged DRF, First Impressions, Redesign, Web Design