Daily Racing Form Fighting For Its Life

LEXINGTON, Ky. - The scene used to be repeated every afternoon at every racetrack in America.

Bettors would buy the Daily Racing Form, head straight for the nearest trash can and discard it all except for the betting-information pages with the past performances.

Banished to rubbish were reams of stories penned along the endless trail of favorites running in the nation's potpourri of feature races. How strange it seems that now those very pages bettors used to throw away might save the Form from extinction.

The Daily Racing Form is fighting the battle of its life in the face of competition from a new race charting company called Equibase that is owned by The Jockey Club and many of the nation's racetracks.

The Form is telling everyone it still will be around to celebrate its first 100 years in 1994. But what shape the Form will take five years from now is a hot discussion topic in the racing industry.

Will the Form continue to publish race charts and horses' past performances in what seems like senseless competition with the new expanded racetrack programs, which are sold at a lower price?

Or will the Form be scaled down to some sort of daily that prints mostly news stories and columns, with sophisticated race analysis replacing the traditional past-performance lines? And will the Form expand to many more types of gambling besides horse racing?

Serious bettors already prefer the charted information in the Form to the track programs, which don't even have speed figures. Some programs can't even print such simple things as the names of stakes races in past-performance lines.

Yet the threat of competition to the Form is very real. During 1991, the first year Equibase provided racing information, 33 tracks began taking their charts and past performances from Equibase.

Jack Farnsworth, who became the president and chief executive officer of the Daily Racing Form last year, insists "there absolutely will be a newspaper" in the future. "I don't see any likelihood that Daily Racing Form is going to go away," he said from his office in New York.

Even so, there are changes on the horizon, Farnsworth said. Among plans for the newspaper are:

-- A Spanish-language edition by the end of 1993, to sell in Latin America, Mexico and places in the United States with a heavy Latin population such as Florida, Southern California and Texas.

-- Possibly expanding into Asia. Farnsworth was to discuss this recently with a Japanese racing representative.

-- Focused editions, such as a breeders' edition for Kentucky. The breeders' edition would include stories and racing statistical information from around the country focused on breeders' interests, eliminating the need for horse farms to buy several different editions as they do now.

-- A different physical format of the paper by Kentucky Derby time this year, including an enhanced page design and color in all editions. Past-performance lines will include a variety of new elements and features.

-- Different uses for the Form's data base of charts and past performances. "As race books grow," Farnsworth said about off-track betting, "there's going to be a demand for information other than just the newspaper."

Despite Farnsworth's optimism, some in racing envision Equibase buying out the Form's data bank, leaving Equibase the sole provider of racing data. Whether that comes about is only a matter of speculation now.

Meanwhile, the Form has begun fighting hard to regain its former hold by offering racetracks unprecedented deals in its new Partners' Program.

The Partners' Program offers tracks a cooperative business relationship. The Form will provide data and even publish track programs. Or the Form will share profits from on-track sales of the Racing Form with the tracks. This is a novel idea, since the Form had never allowed the tracks to share in sales distribution.

Partners' also earmarks a percentage of sales of the Form for on-track promotions and betting seminars, which might appeal to some racetracks.

"I do think the Form has serious problems," said Ken Dunn, president and general manager of Calder Race Course in Miami. "They're making attempts to offer bargains to racetracks."

Farnsworth says that with Partners' Program, the Form is "trying to broaden our base so we can continue in the future."

Yet many believe the Form's future will not rest on such a broad base. They see the newspaper angle as the Form's best survival option, an irony since the stories used to be the part that bettors threw away.

"The Daily Racing Form has lost its raison d'etre, which was they were the guys with the data," said Steve Crist. He is former editor of The Racing Times, a daily news and betting paper whose assets were bought out last February by K-III Communications, which also owns the Racing Form.

"I have bad feelings," said Crist, after seeing The Racing Times abruptly shut down. Yet his opinions on racing publications are sought by many in the industry. Where does Crist think the Form will be some years from now?

Not in the data collection business.

"It seems inevitable the Racing Form will discontinue data collection and become an Equibase client," said Crist. "Our experience at The Racing Times showed it costs $5 (million) to $6 million a year to gather data, and how can the Form continue to justify this?"

Nick Nicholson, a director of The Jockey Club who is also in management of Equibase, said he doesn't think there's any question Equibase can sell data to the Form more cheaply than the Form can collect it.

Yet Nicholson said he thinks there's still plenty of room in racing for the journalism of the Racing Form.

In fact, many think thoroughbred racing would suffer without a daily newspaper to hold the sport together. Stan Bergstein, executive vice president of Harness Tracks of America Inc., said that over the past 30 years he's been saying that "the lack of a daily harness newspaper was very damaging to our sport.

"If anything happened to the Daily Racing Form as a result of Equibase, thoroughbred racing would regret it," Bergstein said. "It would be a major loss."

The Form might find competition even on the journalistic front, however. Crist said several people have been talking about starting racing news services that either can be downloaded into personal computers or inserted in track programs.

The first track to begin offering daily racing news in its program might be Calder when it opens next spring, said the track's president, Dunn. Some tracks like Keeneland and the New York racecourses already include feature stories in the programs, along the lines of Playbill that is sold at Broadway theaters.

"To survive, the Form will have to reinvent itself and improve itself as a newspaper," Crist said.

He suggested that whether or not the Racing Form ends up buying its data from Equibase, it will have to go beyond offering the raw numbers it gives now in the traditional past-performance lines.

The Form will have to go into sophisticated realms like pace analysis to make an appeal to serious bettors, Crist said. "Things that will make people say, "I have to spend an extra $3 a day.' "

The Racing Form has begun bracing for the future in other ways, by streamlining from within. Last month, the Form cut two major editors' jobs and abruptly dismissed the people in those jobs.

The Racing Form also offered a salary buyout and early retirement program to some of its longtime employees. That set off rumors in some of the nation's press boxes that Joe Hirsch, the Form's executive columnist, had been asked to take the buyout.

Hirsch, whose "Derby Doings" and other columns have brought him two Eclipse Awards, flatly denied the rumor.

So did Farnsworth who said, `He's part of our future." Meanwhile, the Racing Form announced establishment of the `"oe Hirsch Speaker Forum," an endowment at the University of Arizona.

Rumors like this are sure to hound the Daily Racing Form until its future takes clear shape.

"It's a shame that three years ago, the Racing Form didn't recognize the serious position the Thoroughbred Racing Associations (of racetracks) had taken on controlling its own data," said Calder's Dunn. "There could have been a nice marriage."

Dunn said he thinks the Racing Form and Equibase still might reach an agreement. "It's probably a matter of the Racing Form deciding where they want to go," Dunn said. "Equibase knows exactly where it wants to go."