AP changes policy on races?

Just reading Mike Harris' preview for tomorrow's race and noticed he said Auto Club 500. Hasn't it been standard practice for a few years now to refer to the race as "Sunday's race at ______ Speedway?"

 

From the title, this seemed like it might be another of SportsJournalists.com's popular "Diversity" threads

 

I thought this was going to say they had gone back to using "colored people."

 

I don't think this was policy, if for no other reason than I remember formatting agate for the Food City 500 like 10 years ago. If you're going to eliminate it from your prose, wouldn't you eliminate it from the agate, too?

 

They didn't use race names for at least the last portion of last year.

What threw me off on Harris' lede tonight was that he named the Cup race, but not the actual race he covered. Kenseth won the Busch Series race, but 15 of the top 16 will run the Auto Club 500.

Very odd.

 

IIRC, they had the whole title in the agate head but didn't once refer to the commercialized name of the race in the optionals. So Appgrad is right.

They still have the rule of telling us why anonymous sources want to stay anonymous, though it's obvious in most cases. This comes from a source who did not want to be identified because it would mean they talked to a hack like me.

 

I'm fine with never using the sponsors in stories. After all, they aren't paying our newspapers for the plug, are they?