Death of the Nascar beat?

I have been saying for about 10 years that I expect one day for newspapers to quit sending writers on the road altogether. I said that after hearing a publisher complain about how much was being spent on wire services when they were only using them for a few national and international stories. I think NASCAR is a beat many publishers will feel they can do without.

 

The sport has changed significantly in the past decade and in many ways it has become the PGA Tour on wheels.

Instead of being a regional sport like it was before, NASCAR has become a national sport. They're in Chicago, Phoenix, SoCal, etc. That's expensive. At the same time, the sport has grown to the point where AP is doing a better job all the time covering it.

Because of that, I can understand papers pulling back on the NASCAR a little bit. If a paper doesn't cover a race in Phoenix or some night race somewhere, they're going to save some money. At the same time, they're probably not have their coverage suffer all that much. Maybe it means that papers are going to cover, say two-thirds of the races instead of all of them.

I say there's a comparison with golf because how many papers cover every PGA Tour event. I think the answer is one: USA Today. The NYT is out there a lot, but there are some weeks when their golf writer is covering the US Women's Open or McDonald's instead of going to, say, Milwaukee.

While papers have 'locals' in both of these sports, they are still largely sports where you write the winner or the most compelling story. It's not a beat where the paper expects you to cover the home team.

Is it the death of the beat? I don't know that I'd go that far. It's simply something different in difficult times. There was a time when papers would cover the AFC Championship game and the NFC Championship game in addition to the Super Bowl and all for men's basketball regionals, and the NBA and NHL Finals and the ALCS and NLCS in addition to the World Series. How many papers do that now?

 

I think we are seeing the death of the newspaper Nascar beat for all of the reasons you guys mentioned but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Covering a couple of races here and there isn't the equivalent of a beat. And for now only the biggest papers are going to bother carrying a beat.

The newspapers I mentioned were both over 100,000 in the heart of the South. Nascar is a way of life down here. But it appears that they can get all their news from the internet, TV and the wire.

 

I hate writing all caps and I don't have a small caps feature ...

 

Pretty good comparison, accguy, though I had no idea that USA Today is the only source at PGA events week in and week out. Doesn't ESPN's Jason Sobel go to all the events? No matter, it's still interesting to think about the cutbacks in staff-written coverage of the "beat."

And I hate the NYT Nascar style, as well. Booooo.

 

Part of this stems from the trend of races moving away from the South, and therefore making the sport more expensive to cover. Five years ago, all three major papers in South Carolina -- Columbia, Greenville and Charleston -- had full-time NASCAR beat writers. Now, none do. In each case, the writer moved on to cover the sport for a national publication, and the vacancy either wasn't filled or was filled by a writer covering another sport. The cuts at W-S make sense, because the departure of Winston as title sponsor means the sport doesn't carry as much clout in that town as it used to. Of course, that doesn't explain Atlanta, which is killing off its NASCAR beat all together, proof that there are execs in that newsroom who need to spend more time mingling among the great unwashed.

Five or six years ago, papers from Knoxville to Birmingham to Tampa all covered large chunks of the schedule. Now, they don't. No question, it's expensive as hell to cover. But AP has also stepped it up, moving beyond the barely capable Mike Harris and covering it with several writers as comprehensively as they cover any other beat. In the early 2000s, there was barely any AP wire copy on NASCAR at all. Now, there's more than anyone can ever use. So why foot the bill while Jenna Fryer can do it pretty damn well for you? And the media centers are packed, but they're packed with different people than before -- fewer daily newspaper writers, and more writers for web sites, national publications, and trade publications. The beat isn't dying; far from it. But it is changing.

 

There's one other issue, and NASCAR has no one to blame but itself for this one: The increase in night races, which now make up nearly one-third of the schedule.

No daily newspaper sports editor with a clue is going to spend the bucks to send a reporter to a race where he or she's not going to be able to file before deadline, particularly for the Sunday paper. That's just idiotic.

 

NASCAR cares a lot about not having newspapers covering the beat. It is the subject of much discussion/debate these days.

 

Not only has racing expanded by building tracks across the country, but the origins of the drivers have also expanded. A lot of those papers in the Southeast that have stopped covering NASCAR as a beat obviously do it for financial reason because the travel has gotten expensive. But I'd imagine that not having as many drivers from the Southeast compared to the "glory days" is another reason. There has been a huge migration from open-wheel racing to NASCAR, especially in the last decade -- guys like Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Juan Pablo Montoya to name a few. If you look at individual drivers as comparable to pro teams, you can easily see why the Charlottes, Winston-Salems and Richmonds travel a good bit. Almost all of the shops are based near Charlotte, Winston-Salem is in the middle of a ton of tracks and Richmond has nearby tracks and several big name drivers (Hamlin, the Burtons) from its region. So certain areas can still get away with traveling because it is a necessity to cover some of the local talent.

 

He could have also been trying to write the word races. That typo works just as well as racks.

 

In NASCAR's odd point system, each race matters less than a comparable PGA event, so swooping in to cover Phoenix or Watkins Glen from Richmond just doesn't deliver as much as more locally tuned content.