It’s been an incredibly busy week for BloodHorse employees...we hope you haven’t noticed. The company has moved locations—lock, stock, barrel, and mouse pad—from the Beaumont Centre area of Lexington across Harrodsburg Road to 821 Corporate Drive into the second floor of The Jockey Club building. The new digs are pretty nice.
Despite disruption of publication of the Daily for one edition and some down time of BloodHorse.com and our phone system as our servers were dismantled, packed, shipped, and reassembled, the transition appeared to be relatively seamless on our end. The heavy lifting for the team’s migration has been spearheaded by president, publisher, and CEO John Keitt Jr., assistant editor Debbie Tuska, Eva Waters, circulation accounting manager Lauren Glover, and technology director Courtney Bearse. We also received incredible help from The Jockey Club team.
Employees had grown accustomed to the old joint. BloodHorse moved into the Beaumont Centre Circle location in the summer of 2004, from the even older BloodHorse building the company had moved into in the Gardenside area of town in 1965.
The cover story of the first issue we published from the Beaumont Centre address featured the reported $39 million stud deal for dual classic winner Smarty Jones. The week’s news was also highlighted by Thoroughbred owner B. Wayne Hughes making a big splash by purchasing Spendthrift Farm.
Things were simpler still in 1965. After several locations in downtown Lexington, from a one-room office in the old Phoenix Hotel, to the third floor of the Lexington Herald building at the corner of Barr and Walnut Streets, to an address on High Street, BloodHorse found a place to stretch its legs in the suburbs.
In the “What’s Going On Here” column of March 13, 1965, editor Kent Hollingsworth noted of the old High Street location: “It shrunk. Like an old army uniform, it no longer fastens. The place seems smaller, whereas the number of Thoroughbred foals each year, number of races, amount of purse money, and volume of racing records have doubled and almost tripled in the last 20 years.”
BloodHorse might have had several homes throughout its 100-plus year history in Lexington, but its mission has remained constant. Back in 1929 the monthly publication The Thoroughbred Horse was renamed The Blood-Horse and went to a weekly format, where it remains. In 1935 the American Thoroughbred Breeders Association bought the magazine from publisher Thomas Cromwell and announced it was “not purchased in order to make changes so much as to perpetuate the influence and the service which have made it invaluable to its subscribers.”
The idea was pretty simple: “There will be drawn a distinct line between the news, special articles, and editorials on the one hand, and advertising on the other. In short, it is the desire of the ATBA that The Blood-Horse be a dignified, accurate, enterprising magazine whose ideals will be the betterment of racing and the proper services of its readers.”
Despite remarkable and even radically different ways in which content is now delivered, the purpose of BloodHorse remains the same. From our editorial charter:
“BloodHorse is a trade publication for the business of breeding, as well as a news magazine for the sport of racing. Its coverage ranges from race reporting to profiles on industry personalities, from pedigrees to farm management, from medication issues to simulcasting, and anything in between that is newsworthy and important to the racing and breeding industry.”
Regardless of where we ply our trade, we remain here for the Thoroughbred industry.
