In a memo to the Orlando Sentinel staff, NASCAR coverage was officially cut today.
"With the increasing demand to produce local news, we've decided to eliminate our national NASCAR coverage and focus more on local sports coverage," it states.
This is part way toward fulfilling my prediction made just a few days ago, that national sports coverage would be eliminated at numerous regional papers to focus instead on local. Transitioning now to local coverage within sports sections, like the Sentinel is doing, might head-off the eventual cut of the daily, standalone sports section from the newspaper.
Comments (2)
I'm all for making newspapers more local. But I think this a bad decision by Tribune. I don't know much about racing, but I recognize Hinton's name because of all the good work he's done. If Tribune was smart they would've created NASCAR site, let Hinton lead it and build a community there.
You're always talking about how media companies should buy niche dotcoms. Well this was a chance for a national media company, who employed a top NASCAR reporter, to create one of those dotcoms instead of having to pay for one.
I wouldn't recommend this solution for many papers but Tribune is a big national company, so a venture makes sense. I'm curious to see when newspapers try to breaking up their main site into several niche sites (with totally different urls). This will allow users to find content without having to click three times, foster better community discussions and make it easier for the ad people to sell.
Posted by Isaac | January 3, 2008 1:14 AM
Posted on January 3, 2008 01:14
You're right, I never expected that NASCAR would be the first national coverage area to be cut. Having little interest in NASCAR myself, I don't know whether there are already loads of coverage outlets, making this an already saturated niche. If it isn't, then it would have been an opportunity.
Posted by Lucas | January 3, 2008 9:47 AM
Posted on January 3, 2008 09:47