EDITORIAL SHAKE-UP AT BLOOD-HORSE
What’s going on here? Blood-Horse Publications has engaged its top three editors in a game of musical chairs, the Paulick Report has learned, with new assignments for all three. The shakeup actually makes a lot of sense to this observer, who spent 15 years as editorial chief of the Lexington-based publishing company whose flagship weekly magazine has struggled in the last two years during a brutal recession and shifting media climate.
According to sources, Eric Mitchell, formerly the head of digital media, will be replacing Dan Liebman as the company’s top editorial executive overseeing the weekly magazine and most of the other print and digital editorial products. Liebman will be responsible for producing the weekly magazine and, in a reversal of management roles, will now report to Mitchell. Evan Hammonds, formerly responsible for putting together the magazine each week, will take Mitchell’s old position in charge of digital products, including the bloodhorse.com website. He will also report to Mitchell under the new scheme.
The new titles and responsibilities are expected to be announced Thursday in a press release that could outline new job titles for other editorial staff members.
I hired all three individuals during my tenure at the company. Liebman joined the Blood-Horse first as research director, Hammonds was then brought on as managing editor and Mitchell later joined the company, first as a senior writer and then moved on to other positions, including research director, editor of the TBH MarketWatch newsletter and finally head of digital media.
When I parted ways with the Blood-Horse in 2007, Liebman was named my replacement as editorial director of the company and editor in chief of the weekly magazine. In the ensuing 24 months he has had to reduce staff and slash expenses as a result of declining advertising revenue.
Mitchell brings outstanding skill sets to his new position, both journalistically and as someone acutely aware of the migration of many readers from print to online resources. He has a very good overview of the Thoroughbred industry, in part because of his experience as a writer who covered many of its most complex issues on the racing side of the business, and from his years as editor of MarketWatch, which examines stallions, breeding and the marketplace.
If anyone worked harder than Mitchell during my years at the Blood-Horse, it was Evan Hammonds, who while responsible for producing the weekly magazine as managing editor was also instrumental in developing many of the online features at Bloodhorse.com. I would look for his full-time input at Bloodhorse.com to be very productive and creative. Liebman, whose strengths are his breeding industry knowledge and good network of sources in Kentucky, has his work cut out in filling Hammonds’ shoes in producing the weekly magazine.
All in all, I view these changes as very positive—for the company and its many dedicated employees, and for the industry in general, which benefits from a healthy weekly trade magazine. There’s no guarantee Mitchell will be able to turn around the company’s fortunes, but I don’t think there’s any doubt it has a much better chance of doing so under his leadership.
Copyright © 2009, The Paulick Report
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Tags: blood-horse publications, bloodhorse, bloodhorse.com, dan liebman, eric mitcell, evan hammonds, Paulick Report, Ray Paulick
November 18th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Magazines are like newspapers…..Yugos trying to qualify for the front row at the Indy 500. With so much material available instantaneously on the excellent website of The Blood-Horse, the magazine has essentially become a “collector’s copy” each week. That is a quality trio in the world of journalism, but it is more than economic factors from the tsunami that continues to rip at this nation which is making the magazine’s ad revenue and jobs shrink and shrink.
November 19th, 2009 at 3:31 am
As a retired newspaperman, the trouble can be summed up in nine little words:
readers won’t
pay for content and don’t
read print.
November 19th, 2009 at 4:49 am
The problem isn’t any one medium. What’s happened in the past 30 years is that American manufacturers & middlemen - why, who knows - increasingly cannot find ad agencies that can create ads THAT MAKE PEOPLE WANT TO BUY THINGS.
Flip Side: The executives that sign the checks who will buy ANYTHING submitted by agencies. They have absolutely no idea what they’re buying. Results: Ads that five seconds after they’re on the air - or being seen in a magazine - are DOA.
When was the last time you saw an advertisement, - in print, on the radio, & especially, on TV - that COMPELLED you to pay attention to it?
That - as soon as it finished - you dropped everything & grabbed a phone to order the product or got on the Internet to do the same?
Or unable to act immediately, you made plans to go as soon as possible to a showroom or a department store where the product is being sold?
Bad ads create poor sales, which decrease or kill off future advertising dollars that are not spent to create new ads that could run in magazines or on TV stations that ran bad ads last month & whose advertising revenues now are collapsing.
Honorable Mention: Bad Print “Ad Positioning.”
Trainer Linda Rice recently paid for ¾ of a BH page in the first-third of the magazine to thank her OWNERS for their support, without which, her winning the 2009 Saratoga training title would have been impossible.
Her ad agency did an excellent job. It was well-written; it looked great.
Then, someone at BH decided that her ad should be surrounded by an attention-grabbing, bad-news article with a blazing headline (talk about black type!) proclaiming the woeful predicament of a notable horse OWNER, convicted of a felony & now awaiting sentencing.
BRILLIANT!
November 19th, 2009 at 8:12 am
The problem with the BH is it is a stale publication. If you pick up the 1/14/08 issue and the 1/14/09 issue, most likely it is the same content. They just keep regurgitating the same old crap over and over again. Meanwhile, the editorial standards have disappeared since Paulick’s departure. This year, I have been a victim of BH twice. Once, they ran an insulting letter to the editor that involved me which clearly displayed the lack of leadership in the editorial department. Second, they refused to pay their bill for work I had done over 18 months for Keeneland Magazine, and the forced me to take “trade” to satisfy the debt. Problem is, no one wants to buy the trade. Third, once I raised objections to how all this was handled, I lost my job with TOBA without even a phone call to explain their actions. Big props to Stacy Bearse for all the hard work burnin down the house.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:14 am
PS: Ray, why in hell is Bearse still there? Hasn;’t he run out of scapegoats yet? And who was responsible for all the millions of dollars The Blood-Horse lost with its failed BH Now mess? Wasn’t that Eric Mitchell?
November 19th, 2009 at 8:59 am
The Blood Horse is a superb publication. I look forward to readiing it weekly, particulalry so the bios on assorted characters in the game. The print quality of photos on high quality coated paper is unrivaled. Detractors are advised to review weekly publications covering other sports and may then stop whining.
William Webb
TOBA member
November 19th, 2009 at 9:03 am
BH Hater,
As evidence above, the PR is now head cheerleader (not that there is anything wrong with that) for the industry, so good luck finding out that answer, even though it doesn’t matter. Its more important to contemplate the future.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Could this possibly be a sign that the Board [Janney, Farish, Van Clief, et al] woke up one morning and realized that TBH’s relevance in the industry was shrinking along with its revenues and reserves?
November 19th, 2009 at 10:24 am
The problem with the BH is NOT Dan Liebman! Bearse? TOBA? the Board? all maybe’s but it ain’t Dan!
November 19th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Well here’s one old media hack who thinks that the BH staff do an outstanding job! I think Dan did well with the resources he had available.
But you take the quickening decline of this confusing and confused industry, a punishing recession and rapidly shifting media landscape and suddenly you are walking on quicksand.
I am with John G. There may be problems peculiar to the BH (show me a print publication that isn’t sliding in this environment), but from where I sit they did not appear to be Dan’s fault at all.
November 19th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Here & There:
The woebegone state that the TBH is in today can clearly be seen by the lack of response to Ray’s article.
Twenty-four hours later, a mere ten postings have appeared. Either the thousands of people who read Ray’s article just don’t care what happens to the TBH (unthinkable, a decade earlier), or they’re on the Caribbean beaches.
To Mr. BH Hater: Yes, the TBH is stale (should it be put up to auction, we can hold a “For Stale Sale.”). Your method of comparing issues a year apart in order to prove how the BH’s repetitive writing has been recycled is an excellent one.
However, in principle, I think they certainly had the right to run an “insulting letter” if it had stated an opinion contrary to yours. But that is not a defense of possible libel, had that been the case; & if you lost your job defending your own principles, then you are commendably exposing a nest of rats by saying what you have said.
If you would please elaborate on what “BH Now Was” was, & why you believe that it’s failure contributed to the decline of TBH itself, that would be greatly appreciated.
Mr. Bearse, that fun-loving student of history (Stace, that’s covers what has happened a little further back in time than last week), might want to look up how Mr. Raoul Fleischmann nearly destroyed his New Yorker magazine in the 1930s, after he siphoned off his publishing profits into a Broadway theatre publication, “Stage,” that consequently lost millions of dollars.
If that era is too far removed to be relevant to a contemporary perspective, instead, fast forward into the present & look into how Si Newhouse has halved the personal wealth of his family, in large part by having re-directed the profits of his healthy magazines into the now-failed publication of Portfolio Magazine.
All of the above, perhaps, is relevant to what Mr. BHH is referring to.
On another note, Dan Liebman, regardless of whatever talent he possesses, quickly became a symbol of how stale the BH had become.
His humorless, paceless, & pedantic editorial page essays lacked fire, pace, & spirit. After reading his early work, I ceased paying any attention to what he had to say.
“Former Disgruntled Employee Says” - Please clarify: Are you a disgruntled former employee, or formerly disgruntled & now reasonably satisfied?
Mr. Webb’s admonition that “Detractors are advised to review weekly publications covering other sports…” does not ring true.
TBH’s editorial standards for photography are outstanding (one shudders to imagine where the magazine would be today without the talented TBH editors who consistently select the best possible photographs to accompany the articles). It is agreed that in this respect, I have seen no other sporting magazine with a superior product in today’s market.
But you cannot defend a failing enterprise by pointing out that other endeavors in your field are even bigger flops - any more than the New York Mets management can rationalize the collapse of their 2009 season by correctly pointing out that WDC, the one team in their division with a worse W/L record than the Mets, was pathetic.
C. Kelly’s “As evidence above, the PR is now head cheerleader (not that there is anything wrong with that) for the industry…” is also an ill-advised statement.
Ray Paulick has picked more fights sticking up for what he believes in, in the short time that PR has been in existence, than anyone one other editor or writer in the racing field.
(With the possible exception of the indispensably combative Bill Finley, who really should get a Lifetime Award for this sort of thing. Mr. Bearse, if he has not yet been handed an Eclipse, is my counterpoint nominee for a “TOBA” - “That Other Bs Award.”)
RP is constitutionally incapable of compromising his principles, & thus, it is a miracle that he is still in business, much less having prospered in an arena that is, sadly, infamous for its disreputable record of dubious ethics & shady wheelings and dealings.
To regard him as a “cheerleader” for anything - anything! - other than YMCA classes in knife-handling safety, is to reveal the indiscriminate thinking of a careless mind.
November 20th, 2009 at 9:20 am
The PR has turned into the voice aka head cheerleader for the industry, was an underhanded compliment meaning the BH is not a factor in relevant, critical issues to be worked out, it is now the PR. It was critical in that articles have not been up to par has they have been the inaugural year.
My hope was that as the site gained momentum, leaders would be called on the carpet.
I guess the industry changes (BC/Equibase) the PR has already achieve has wetted my appetite, and I am afraid of where that line will be drawn!
There are so many issues that could be resolved through the PR’s urging, I want to see more.
November 20th, 2009 at 10:15 am
The “indispensably combative” Bill Finley comment made me chuckle. If he’s the best example of hard-hitting American turf writing, then the sport is indeed in trouble. Paulick has done more to address the core issues and ills of this sport in the short lifespan of The Paulick Report than Finley has done in more than 2 decades of coverage.
November 20th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
The Blood-Horse sees the TB industry through the eyes of its owner–TOBA, aka The Establishment. That’s why it runs from problematic core issues such as leadership, favoritism, artificial insemination, and pinhooking. We’ve come to expect the BH (far more than its major competitor) to shield its benefactors from public scrutiny. It’s doubtful this shake-up of its lackies will do anything to create the independent and investigative style of journalism our industry so badly needs.
November 21st, 2009 at 12:18 pm
the bloodhorse is dead. the reasons many. it’s symptomatic of the sport in general and the media in particular.
and i know why.
when my LEARNING stops i lose interest.
how do i keep learning about a sport and business i’m addicted to?
With my twitter account. it is a better investment of my time and better learning value. i get to construct my racing info by who i feel is worth listening to.
who i follow, what i read, can change whenever i feel my learning has stopped.
i am responsible for my education and i don’t sub it out to some magazine editor at a price. my attention is specific to my interests and not generic to a predetermined mass audience.
yes, i run into many twitters who are a waste of time but i have found some gems, some people that i now actively seek to have in my life. that’s priceless and virtually never is an outcome of subscribing to a magazine.
I tweet, i follow, my life is better for it.
at 62 i’m actively involved designing my own curriculum to make me a better horsetrainer & more successful horse breeder.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:08 pm
RAY;
SOUNDS LIKE THE WORLD IS COMING APART