The Racetrack Beat Writer: A Vanishing Breed Aug 5th 2013, 00:32
On Friday, June 7, the biggest news in the Belmont Park press box had nothing to do with the Belmont Stakes, taking place the next day. The buzz wasn't about which horse might win, or what effect that day's drenching rains might have on the track. The biggest news came when word spread that the New York Post had laid off its racing writer and two handicappers.
The day before the Belmont Stakes, meaning that one of New York's biggest papers would carry news about New York's biggest race with wire copy.
Until that day, New York City posted two daily papers, the Daily News and the Post, that covered racing every day, with handicapping, columns, race recaps, and features. Both papers sent writers to every major racing event and to Saratoga for the entirety of the seven-week meet.
Still, perhaps the news shouldn't have been much of a bombshell. Not long before, the Daily News had moved the bulk of its racing coverage to an internet-only blog, and a year and a half ago, the weekly Thoroughbred Times declared bankruptcy (disclosure: at one time I was a contributor to both the Daily News and Thoroughbred Times). The combination of two industries, journalism and horse racing, struggling with decreasing revenues is maybe not exactly two great tastes that taste great together.
The loss of the Post's coverage is nonetheless a blow. It had a loyal following and for a certain demographic was a primary source of racing information and a key handicapping tool ; on the train to Aqueduct, where racing takes place six months out of the year in New York, there were far more New York Posts than Daily Racing Forms or iPads.
But the coverage went beyond handicapping: due in large part to the work of the three New York racing beat writers—in the Daily News, the Post, and the Daily Racing Form—attention was brought to an unusual spate of breakdowns during the winter of 2012 at Aqueduct, attention that resulted in a task forces and changes in procedures in an attempt to reduce equine fatalities. The daily coverage of the injuries was followed by a series about race track injuries in the New York Times.
If you check out Twitter or Equidaily or Raceday360, you'll find no dearth of racing coverage. Much of it comes from tweets or blogs, some from people at tracks without regular beat writers, generating and feeding interest in circuits that might not otherwise get much exposure. Sometimes the writers are track employees, sometimes they're fans; sometimes they're at the races, sometimes they're far away. Sometimes they are paid public relations people, touting their clients; sometimes they are industry representatives promulgating a particular agenda. Some of them are people whose primary job it is to cover Thoroughbred racing; few of them are people who are at the racetrack every day.
The summer racing season, concentrated at Del Mar in southern California and Saratoga in upstate New York, expands racing's coverage: in the Capital District, at least five newspapers cover racing daily, with writers from Long Island, Buffalo, and Kentucky shipping in for the major stakes races.
But for a sport that craves national attention, one that courts celebrities with the desperation of an ignored groupie stalker, the end of the high-profile racing meets at Saratoga and Del Mar will come far too soon. When New York racing returns to Belmont in early September, the press box crowd at Saratoga, which numbers in the dozens on any given day, will shrink to three people at Belmont during the week with a couple more showing up on the weekend.
The reports of the death of horse racing have likely been exaggerated; it's true that attendance has plummeted and handle has declined, but it's also true that horse racing doesn't seem in a hurry to go away. According to figures provided by Equibase, $ 934,148,000 was wagered on racing in this country in June, down 1.57 percent from June 2012. Year-to-date wagering is $ 5,612,498,374, down less than 1 percent from a year ago.
Looking back further would reveal steeper declines in wagering, and there's no arguing that, much as newspapers need to figure out how to adapt to a changing landscape, so too do racetracks. Attracting attention, and with it customers and gambling dollars, at racing's big events—the Triple Crown races, the Breeders' Cup, Keeneland, Saratoga, Del Mar—is easy. But those events are the exceptions, not the rule, in the racing business, and the loss of coverage of the quotidian racing that keeps farms open and horse van companies in business, and that provides jobs for stable workers and feed store employees, can't help but have a profound and negative effect on the business of racing, and with it an economy that in New York State provides 40,000 jobs.
Lost with the dismissed beat writers is the expertise of people who have spent decades in the game, who know its history and who can place current events and issues in context, who can discuss the big questions facing the sport with a perspective born of years of observation and analysis. That expertise is now being cultivated and nurtured by too few publications, at too few racetracks around the country–I'm hard-pressed to think of any writers in their 20s or 30s whose job it is to cover the sport from the racetrack, every racing day. It doesn't seem so implausible to wonder that if a horse race happens and no one's there to cover it, will anyone really care?
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