There’s a great post today at the Sports PR Blog about NASCAR’s recent embrace of citizen journalism for race coverage. The program has a fantastic-sounding title - Citizen Journalists Media Corp - but the term is may be a bit of a misnomer though as several of the “citizens” are former NASCAR beat writers who’s newspaper jobs went bye-bye within the last year. Here’s the quote from NASCAR:
“We have been overwhelmed by the positive response since our initial announcement to form the NASCAR Citizen Journalist Media Corps last month,” said NASCAR managing director of corporate communications Ramsey Poston. “More voices speaking about NASCAR is good for the sport and is fan-friendly. We intend to make the most of the changing media landscape.”
Regardless of whether or not the writers in question are professional writers or not, it’s great to see a large sports organization, especially and old-school media machine like NASCAR, embrace the blogosphere and social media. This comes on the heels of a recent announcement by Bleacher Report that 16 of it’s writers will be covering NFL teams for CBSSports.com. That was originally supposed to be 32 writers to cover all NFL teams, but something happened along the way where that number was cut in half. You can read one candidates take on the ensuing drama over not being selected here.
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