Bristol Motor Speedway
COLUMN: Countdown over, we're hoping DirtonDirt.com clicks
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick tick. ...
I endured a love-hate relationship with that pesky DirtonDirt.com countdown clock that continuously rolled for fiftysomething days. One tick of the clock I was exhilarated by thoughts of the new venture, while the next tick I fretted over our preparations to produce such an ambitious website for the Dirt Late Model community.
Let the exhilaration begin.
We hope many viewers and readers have been anticipating DirtonDirt.com's launch in recent weeks, too, and we think you'll be as excited as we are about the new website after you get a chance to look around at the vast offerings of stories, videos and other news resources.
Our mission? To provide a one-stop multimedia website for the Dirt Late Model fan featuring timely news and results in a well-organized, easy-to-find structure. In short, DirtonDirt.com founder Michael Rigsby and I have tried to create, plan and develop the kind of website we've always believed Dirt Late Model racing deserved.
If Late Models are involved, DirtonDirt.com will be all over it. At the nation’s biggest events — including the World 100 and Dirt Track World Championship — we're anxious to provide wall-to-wall, multiple-day coverage with continuously updated original content available in a gamut of formats: video, text stories, photo galleries and more.
Week-to-week, DirtonDirt.com will keep tabs on news and results from more than three dozen series, including the World of Outlaws Late Model Series and Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series. Weekly racing and crate engine Late Model action will also find a home at DirtonDirt.com.
Come along for the ride and see what you think.
Personally, DirtonDirt.com is a gratifying return to my motorsports journalism roots. In 1995, I unknowingly started my departure from traditional newspapering by developing DirtNews Digest, a barebones, seat-of-the-pants website that featured frequent email reports on major Dirt Late Model events. While more than 2,200 subscribers eventually signed on, the fledgling Internet publication never became lucrative. It did, however, lead me to a satisfying job at National Dirt Digest as a staff writer and photographer, and eventually I spent nine years at the Murphy, N.C.-based publication, adding duties as managing editor and page designer.
I relished that job and the opportunities owners Brian and Carolyn McLeod provided, but down deep I itched to provide more immediate news and stories than the every-other-week publication allowed.
For the past few years, Michael and I chatted on the phone and kicked around ideas about what would eventually become DirtonDirt.com. As the story goes — and Michael's girlfriend Amber Vander Pluym, DirtonDirt.com's marketing and promotions director, laughs every time she hears it — Michael and I met in the pits at West Plains (Mo.) Motor Speedway during the 1996 Show-Me 100 weekend. The bespectacled 14-year-old with a lisp flagged me down to talk about DirtNews Digest and we remained friends as he started his own career in writing first and later broadcasting.
Our first discussions of a racing website seemed to be pie-in-the-sky visions of what might have been in the perfect Dirt Late Model world. But Rigsby, who had blossomed into a talented television journalist at the NBC affiliate in Madison, Wis., persisted and DirtonDirt.com was eventually born.
It's a platform where we both hope to shine.
I'm excited about the opportunity to provide readers fresh stories within minutes and hours of the checkered flag falling, instead of the week or longer it takes racing papers to arrive in mailboxes. That immediacy has rejuvenated my enthusiasm for reporting and writing about a sport that is so often ignored by mainstream media.
I'll also coordinate reports from our dedicated contributors along with series and track contacts, as well as managing and editing the photo content from contributing photographers who will provide dazzling color images.
But in some ways, you'll find that some of the routine textual race reports are merely window dressing for one of DirtonDirt.com's unique features: Michael's video stories and reports. The eye-popping video is rare enough for Dirt Late Models, but to have someone reporting who understands the sport's subtleties makes the clips all the more impressive.
The stories, photos and video provide a solid package as we launch DirtonDirt.com, but we hope to develop the site further in the coming years to make the most of the web's multimedia opportunities.
We're pleased with the framework of the initial DirtonDirt.com site, but we realize that visualizing DirtonDirt.com's potential is a work in progress. Look for DirtonDirt.com to grow and develop as we massage it to make it the best Dirt Late Model site we possibly can for viewers and readers.
We've gotten things clicking. So keep clicking on us.
