Friday, March 5, 2010

Darrell Waltrip Discovers Twitter


It had to come sooner or later. Darrell Waltrip's younger brother Michael is one of the greatest NASCAR tweeters of all-time. Long before Twitter became the cool thing to do in the sport, there was Mikey!

Pictures of socks, sponsor products, TV shoots and almost anything else that was swirling through his rather unique mind seemed to find its way on Twitter. Waltrip now has over 33 thousand folks following him on his @mw55 social media journey.

Now, big brother has signed-on with the name @AllWaltrip. Darrell got the hang of things rather quickly and noticed that Twitter is kind of catchy.

Certain traits might just run in the family. Before long, Darrell was talking about the final Gordon pitstop in Las Vegas, his sick hound dog and Geoff Bodine's Olympic bobsleds. As Waltrip got the hang of it, things began to mushroom.

Here are some fun DW tweets:

About NASCAR on FOX: TV is 60% mental, the other 50% is delivery.

About his TV viewing: Better get to bed, time for O'Reilly, he's good but I'm starting to dig Glen Beck!

About his endless chatter: People say "you sure do talk a lot." May I remind those people I get paid to talk a lot. A picture AND a thousand words, no talk...no pay.

About Junior's nickname: I call him Junebug because when he was a little boy that was what me and Big "E" called him. He told me I was the only one that could do that.

About his Daytona outburst: I just like a good race, an exciting finish. There are times when I just turn into a race fan. Shake and Bake baby that's what DW cheers for.

About today's race schedule: My favorite tracks have always been the short tracks. Big mistake taking them all off the schedule, they are the backbone of the sport!

About Twitter: I've become a Twitter junkie in just a couple of days. I've got to give it a rest, but it sure is fun!!

Last season saw Kyle Petty take his cell phone to the TNT announce booth and use Twitter to interact with fans during the live TNT races. This season, Petty has been tweeting during his various appearances on SPEED shows, including RaceDay and Victory Lane.

That kind of naturally leads to the question of the moment. This Friday, Waltrip will be on the air from Atlanta Motor Speeway. He will call Sprint Cup Series practice, qualifying and appear on Trackside. Now armed with Twitter on his trusty cell phone, will Waltrip interact directly with fans during the time he is on the air?

Thursday on ESPN2's NASCAR Now program, host Nicole Manske had Jimmie Johnson answer Twitter questions that NASCAR fans sent in shortly before the program. They were a lot rougher than many journalists are used to asking the champion. Johnson had a great time with it, that was clear.

One thing Twitter does is open up for people like Waltrip the reality around them that they are sometimes insulated from discovering. Simply by giving fans an opportunity to offer feedback directly, perhaps some priorities might change.

Some female fans on Twitter were not very kind when it came to Waltrip's antics with Danica Patrick on the Trackside show. Had Waltrip read their words, he might keep those comments in the back of his mind for the next time he interacts with Patrick.

Certainly, the viewpoints of those fans are not right or wrong. They are just opinions. The key to Twitter is when something happens on live TV, you get to know how viewers react almost instantly. It's like the NASCAR Fan Council with instant voting.

So while TV personalities from Wendy Venturini to Kenny Wallace tweet from the track this week, it should be interesting to see if Waltrip jumps in the deep end of the pool or puts his instant fan feedback gadget in his pocket. This will be one experiment that anyone can watch. Twitter is easy, free and worthwhile for NASCAR fans.

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Thursday, March 4, 2010

Adam Alexander's Rising Star (Updated - Confirmed)


Thursday morning TNT confirmed the network's full line-up for the 2010 season. It will be Adam Alexander is in the driver's seat for the six TNT Sprint Cup Series races along with Kyle Petty and Wally Dallenbach Jr.

It was Ralph Sheheen who stepped in last season for TNT after Bill Weber's departure. Alexander was then added to the TNT pit road reporting crew to fill Sheheen's spot. Apparently, the network liked what it saw.

Click here for a 2007 interview with Alexander from the TruckSeries.com website. It gives good insight into his background and the hard work it has taken to get him to this point.

SPEED TV viewers have seen Alexander increase his presence on the network as well. Originally a Camping World Truck Series reporter, Alexander now hosts shows like NASCAR in a Hurry, The SPEED Report and Race Hub.

The one thing TV viewers have not seen Alexander do is the TV play-by-play on a live race. That club is rather small. Mike Joy, Rick Allen and Marty Reid are the charter members right now. Although we are still waiting on TNT to confirm it, it seems that Alexander is about to get the opportunity of a lifetime this summer.

Update #1: USA Today now says Lindsay Czarniak will host the pre-race shows for the six races on TNT. Marc Fein, the previous host, is busy with the NBA TV Channel these days.

Update #2: Ralph Sheheen will be back on pit road along with Matt Yocum and Marty Snyder. No information on whether or not TNT will hire a fourth pit road reporter.

What are your thoughts on this line-up? To add your opinion, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly website, please keep that in mind when posting. Thanks for stopping by.

"NASCAR Now" vs. "Race Hub" Battle Fizzles


We are now down the road a ways with the newest NASCAR TV situation. This season, both ESPN and SPEED have committed to fulltime daily NASCAR news programs. ESPN began NASCAR Now in 2007. SPEED launched Race Hub late last year and made the decision during the off-season to bring it back for 2010.

Each series leverages the strengths associated with the respective networks. ESPN has a vast resource of reporters working fulltime on NASCAR assignments for TV, magazines and websites. SPEED has virtually the entire NASCAR world right outside its backdoor in the Concord and Mooresville areas of North Carolina.

ESPN learned a hard lesson when the network tried to overlay an existing sports formula on hardcore NASCAR fans. The original on-air talent knew nothing of the sport. Several of the contributors from the ESPN journalism family were little better. The hype-driven approach to NASCAR news fell flat.

None of the three co-hosts now working on the series participated in the early years. Allen Bestwick, Mike Massaro and Nicole Briscoe have teamed-up to give the series a firm foundation. Bestwick's superb Monday hour mixed with the ability of Briscoe and Massaro to work both in the studio and at the track has resulted in unqualified success.

Gone is "columnist" Tim Cowlishaw, the stick-and-ball reporters and the long fantasy racing segments. Now, Lead Reporter Marty Smith is joined by a cast that includes Ryan McGee and Ed Hinton. This year will also see Shannon Spake take on a bigger role both in the studio and on location with news reports.

Since the beginning, the series has also used the NASCAR on ESPN on-air talent as contributors. This year Ray Evernham has been a bonus with his technical knowledge of the many issues and changes currently in progress inside the sport. Rusty Wallace has been his outspoken and feisty self while Brad Daugherty has proven to have much more value in this setting than in his seat at the track.

The biggest improvement of 2010 has been the series taking questions and comments directly from Twitter. An email account still provides a link, but the growing social media trend should not be ignored. The remaining challenge is to increase the number of Sunday night shows from the final seventeen race weekends to the entire season.

NASCAR Now has matured into a comfortable presence in the sport that packs a lot of information into each program and features timely interviews with the newsmakers. Those goals are still quite a bit down the road for SPEED's Race Hub.

Instead of hiring one on-air news personality for the Monday through Thursday programs, SPEED continues to rotate a wide variety of announcers through the position. One day it may be a play-by-play announcer coupled with a pit road reporter. The next it might be a pre-race show host with a news-oriented reporter. The results are uneven.

Race Hub made a casual clothing statement early on, but is still struggling with where to put everyone on the set. The show has evolved into clearly pre-taped interviews that generally accentuate the positive and follow the NASCAR mandate for this season.

The news in the program is presented right off the top. Click over to Race Hub a little late and you have missed the most topical information. One pleasant surprise has been that Jeff Hammond seems to work very well in this setting. He has been perhaps the most outspoken and opinionated analyst on the show.

Jamie McMurray has just been added as a weekly regular, as has Miss Sprint Cup Monica Palumbo. McMurray's appearances start next week, but Palumbo has been working hard to figure out exactly what she is doing on the show. It's certainly not very well defined right now.

SPEED can get almost anyone to just drive over to the studio. What's important is having the news credibility to ask them the tough questions fan want answered. While Race Hub does have a Twitter account, the series is still trying to determine the best way to get things more interactive.

The two big positives of this series are that it is in primetime and has almost all of the potential guests just a short drive away. The downside is the lack of a permanent host and the softball questions.

Last week, truck series announcer Rick Allen was put in the awkward position of interviewing his own color analyst Phil Parsons on the day of the big "start and park" controversy. Allen never even brought it up although Parsons was at the center of the issue.

Right now, the two TV series are happily going their separate ways in style, substance and format. What we thought would be a battle over guests, between hosts and over breaking news headlines never materialized. The NASCAR TV news battle has simply fizzled.

Can you tell us which show you watch and why? What suggestions would you have for the producers of these programs? Who has been the on-air personality that impressed you the most this season?

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