Death of the Nascar beat?

I've worked at two Southern newspapers now that have traded in their highly acclaimed Nascar beat writer to run wire, which provides much more copy at a cheaper cost.

Not surprisingly, both writers went to work for national Nascar sites. But what about newspapers? Are we doing readers a disservice by not offering local copy as the sport grows? Probably not but I figure you guys would know better than me.

Anyone chagrined that the opportunities to cover Nascar are becoming fewer and fewer?

 

Not really my experience. My current paper will never stop covering it, since the town hosts two races each year.

 

I find this amazing, especially in the South.

 

Neither of my papers are in the cities where they have tracks but both are within a couple of hours of three or four tracks. Lots of traveling.

 

What's not having "racks" have anything to do with this?
Can't we just stay on the topic?

 

Same at our paper. I think what happened is NASCAR used to be easy to cover -- just travel the South and East, a lot like an ACC or SEC beat. Over the years, with the new tracks popping up all over the country, it became too much. Think about it ... today's NASCAR requires as much travel (more, really) than the NFL and a lot of the papers that cover NASCAR just aren't "Major League" cities (Richmond on the big side, Florence or Martinsville on the small side).

Just a thought.

 

We use a syndicated weekly NASCAR page.

 

Funny you mention Martinsville b/c for a while they didn't even write a race story. They used the AP one and just wrote sidebars. That stopped for a couple years and may or may not be the policy now. Having a race right in your own town and not writing a main race story makes no sense at all to me.

 

Rack him.

 

It's a fucking typo. A transparent one. I fixed it. Y'all better keep runring your spellcheckers because while I normally avoid taking cheapshots ... payback's a bitch.

 

You oughta keep runring yours, too.

 

I heard the MG cut Mulhern back to about half of the races last year, and Homestead wasn't included in the list of races he was allowed to cover.