Rumors of demise

Item: According to our friends at the Paulick Report (here), the Washington Post has decided that it will no longer cover horse racing.

Item: Our friend Teresa over at Brooklyn Backstretch (here) observes reporters at work following the death of two horses at Aqueduct and suggests that bloggers — valuable as they are — are no substitute for actual reporters, with the skills, experience, and resources to track down good stories.

As far as the mainstream media is concerned, horse racing has almost entirely ceased to exist as a sport.  We may as well be the Arena Football League — except, of course, that their lack of coverage in ‘09 will be traced to their decision to suspend the season entirely.  For horse racing, the beat will go on, with or without media.

Oddly enough, racing and the mainstream media are, in a sense, twins, or at least two sides of the same coin.  Both are long-standing fixtures in our society, important economically, and possessed of a long and meaningful history.

More to the point, both have been swamped by newer, faster, more agile competitors better able to take advantage of emerging media and evolving public tastes.  And both face the entirely real possibility of their own extinction in the foreseeable future.

John Scheinman, the Post’s top-notch soon-to-be-erstwhile racing reporter, decried, in his letter to friends and colleagues, the slow-motion death of newspapers.  Reporters, he correctly notes, are in a sense the bulwark of democracy; they gives us eyes in the corridors of power which we would otherwise not have.  They are — or can be — a key component in the public’s ability to demand accountability.

Old-time trainers suggested that the way to handle owners was to treat them like mushrooms: kept in the dark and covered in manure.  As a sport, for the most part, racing has enthusiastically embraced that approach.  This old-time sport has desperately needed the old-media watchdogs.

Nowadays, with the public’s attention fractured, with the new model focusing on niches rather than commons, the old media are struggling to redefine and recapture their own relevance.  It’s a difficult, and thus far unsuccessful, endeavor.  In part, that’s because by shedding costs, they also shed their own ability to deliver the sort of in-depth and aggressive coverage that made them relevant in the first place.

Meanwhile, a quick tour of racing websites will make plain that the this hidebound dinosaur of a sport has not exactly embraced the power of the internet to create and cultivate its own niche.

The disappearance of racing from the mainstream media need not be a harbinger of the sport’s ultimate fate.  But these days, it looks as if it could be.