My apologies for the lack of site updates yesterday – Monday – but it was quite an eventful day.
Greyhound Star, the newspaper, went to press for its final edition last night. In addition to preparing the last pages, I had a visit from the Racing Post’s Phil Donaldson, who has a feature planned for later this week.
The feelings today are mixed, but the two main emotions are sadness and relief.
I joined the Star in January 1987, in its fourth year of publication, and it was my first full time job as a journalist having previously written columns for the Greyhound Magazine and Sporting Life.
The Star has paid my mortgage and fed my kids. But as the grass roots tracks closed, its readership dropped. As the internet blossomed and British breeding went into meltdown, its advertising income ebbed away.
Faced with closure ten years ago, the old BGRB – or at least elements of it – decided that they didn’t want to lose the industry’s last specialist publication.
They supported the Star with a couple of pages of advertising, and that commitment to the paper was continued by the GBGB – until it could no longer be justified.
I tried everything to keep the ship afloat including a plan to amalgamate the Star to the GBGB Calendar. Sadly that vision wasn’t widely shared.
It wouldn’t be accurate though to blame all the Star’s difficulties on a receding greyhound industry – or specifically the industry’s grass roots – which was the foundation of its readership.
The internet will do a lot more than just decimating the Star’s classified pages. It goes to the heart of journalism in general.
The newspaper industry is in freefall and despite their attempts to charge subscriptions, most nationals have discovered that very few customers are prepared to pay. The on-line subscription concept looks dead in the water.
But while the concept of a ‘free internet’ sounds tempting, it will never really be truly sustainable. If articles are to be written and photographs taken, somebody ultimately has to pay.
Millions of ‘free’ photographs on the internet are only there because someone at a newspaper or magazine decided to commission them.
Yes, there are people who are prepared to contribute their time freely. On numerous occasions, we’ve have had people offering to contribute free articles to the newspaper, we’ve even had free newspapers in opposition, but invariably the quality or commitment isn’t there.
The decision to launch this website was made around 18 months ago and was only achieved due to the support of the industry in general.
Without track promoters, general managers or heads of stadia (or at least some of them), UK greyhound racing would only be served by the Racing Post and the toxic forums, complete with lies, libellous allegations and outrageously inaccurate stories based on gossip and spite. (Don’t they love a conspiracy theory!)
Thankfully, the track bosses preferred to support a site run by someone who has probably upset every one of them in the last 28 years, but at least backs up his stories under his own name.
This site finally went live eleven months ago and our readership continues to grow.
Conscious that so many of our newspaper readers were not computer literate, but desperate to remain part of the industry, we attempted to keep the newspaper going in tandem with the site.
Sadly we simply couldn’t cover costs, and lost a significant sum in our final year, but we DID honour every subscription.
BUT now we kick on!!
Free from the time consuming burden of the newspaper, this site can ratchet up several gears.
We have already introduced the ‘Remember When’ pages, the next one is due on December 1, and will following with vets pages, features, stats, FBGOA news, ‘Fastest of Year’,etc etc and even beefier live news coverage.
But we start today by introducing a new breeding section.
Thanks for all your support – here’s to the next 30 years!
Floyd Amphett
Website editor
(Newspaper editor – retired)
