This will seem a little incestuous, but the Down The Stretch blog was born after Fan590 Sports Director Doug Faraway realized I was publishing a racing paper called Down The Stretch. ( My lawyers are working feverishly on a variety of litigious acitivities concerning copyright infringements, though they do wonder about me suing myself).

We’ve put out 14 issues of Down The Stretch and number 15 is due on Friday, January 22. Just to give you a quick preview, the first issue of 2009 will have an update from Perry Lefko on the Fort Erie situation – right now the possibility of racing at the border landmark is not great. We also have stories on local jockeys winning in warmer climates around the globe; Chantal Sutherland has never lost at Golden Gate Fields and Eurico Rosa da Silva started his winter in Singapore with a controversial win on his first mount.

Regular writer Keith McCalmont gets a lot of face time in the next issue, summing up the final day of Harness Racing at Woodbine in 2008, then covering Generation Next, the upcoming young drivers who will dominate the standardbred side for the next decade or two.

There’s also a couple of stories, one good, one bad about the state of horse slaughter. Stakes winner Clever Allemont was rescued from a dreadful fate, but harness horses in Quebec aren’t so lucky.

As for the on-going status of Down The Stretch (www.downthestretchnewspaper.com)  let’s all bless Mila and Tony Kalloo. I’m not embarassed to admit that advertising revenue in 2008 didn’t quite match expenses. I was told there could be two years of bleeding before the black ink appeared. Mila and Tony are the publishers, who anted up big-time shortly after winning $16 million in the last Super-7 draw of 2006.  A week ago, I went hat in hand to the Kalloos, advising them of a financial shortfall and they offered not just encouragement  and cash, but a huge plate of lasgana, created from scratch by Mila.

Upon gifting me with a cheque sufficient enough to get the paper through another year, Tony gave me some orders ( If you knew how much he’s put into the paper, you’d agree he has this right!).

“You have to create a higher profile for the paper,” he suggested. “Get some radio ads. Make a tv commercial.”

So that is my next assignment. I’m trying to parlay my most excellent status here at the Fan590 and 680News into a series of ads for Down The Stretch. You’ll be hearing these in the immediate future as add-ons to the traffic. Why after traffic, you ask? Because that’s when the most people are listening.

I have also initiated a conversation with HPI, the high-number channel on digital tv that presents the horse races to susbscribers for the purpose of betting on horses around the world. I was pleasantly surprised by their generous rates and should have an eye-pleasing, fast-paced 30 second boast about Down The Stretch runnning in the spring, ideally conciding with the start of the Thoroughbred racing season.

This is quite the life, being a major publisher. Now I know what Hearst and Murdoch feel like. 
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 8:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.