The state of cycling media
What’s going on with cycling media?
Is it OK? Is it ‘broken’? Is it, like a lot of other things, just shite now? Or is it all actually fine and I should just calm down and try and enjoy myself?
Going through the process of creating this website has made me think about cycling media a lot over the last few weeks. It’s been a long time since I looked at so many different sources of written cycling media so closely. And it has made me wistful. It has made me nostalgic for an era of cycling media which has been and gone and will now never return.
I’ve watched all of the articles appear from all of the different sources of news I’ve added on here. I’ve become familiar with the cadence of published articles and the varying quality of the output and I feel rather bereft, at the quality and the quantity. Am I the only one who feels like this? Didn’t it used to be better? Didn’t things used to be good?
I should state here that I’ve been feeling rather bereft in general recently which is definitely making me view this topic with grumpy-tinged spectacles. I’m still bereft at the notion that I don’t work for GCN anymore. I was there for nearly five years. It felt like I was very much at the heart of Cycling Media while I was there and I absolutely loved it. I loved every day. I could not have written a more perfect job description for myself. The role I ended up in took every ounce of expertise I had amassed from every corner of my life and bundled it into a paying job. And now it’s gone and I’m still really cranky about it.
So you’ll just have to forgive me for that crankiness spilling over into this topic, but it is this very topic which is at the heart of the crankiness because the GCN website is just one of several sources that have disappeared and which feels like a symptom of a rot which has crept into cycling media over the last few years and it all just feels very different than it used to.
I must clarify at this point that when I say cycling media here I specifically mean the written word - news websites, magazines, books. And I am definitely, as usual, unconsciously and with blithe ignorance referring to the English written word only. The cycling media landscape in other languages might be absolutely fine, I have no idea because I’m a linguistic neanderthal.
I think it was probably around 10 years ago where we were at the absolute peak of English language cycling media. Team Sky had well and truly taken over. Wiggins and Froome and Brailsford had won the Tour de France for the past two years. It felt like there was a new cycling book being published every other week. Anyone who was recently retired was getting a book deal. And it seemed like any writer with any half-decent idea for a book was getting one out for Christmas or for Tour de France time.
The shelves in Easons or WHSmith were crammed with magazines. Pro Cycling magazine was magnificent, Cyclist had recently been launched, Rouleur had a specific newsagent edition, Cycling Weekly was the same as ever of course. I was and still am only into racing but there were other bike and tech mags there too - BikesEtc, Cycling Active, Cycling Plus. There were more mags on the shelves about cycling than any other sport.
The websites were all booming. CyclingNews was the original and the boss but it had competition. Velonation was still around. CyclingTips was just getting going and looked great - it was crisp and clean and big in a way that don’t think I’d really seen before on a website, certainly not a cycling one. The Cycle Sport and Rouleur websites produced articles to supplement their print editions. For Irish cycling specifically we had two (two!) dedicated websites, Sticky Bottle which is still going and Irish Pro Cycling which is long gone. There was VeloNews for the Yanks. And again, there were the non-race specific ones like Road.cc and BikeRadar which I’m sure were popular but I didn’t really care for.
It seems quaint now (and ironic given where you’re reading this) but there were blogs! Remember them? There were endless blogs. I had one myself. But so did everyone else. Blogs on everything and anything to do with cycling. The best of which was The Inner Ring who incredibly is still going, still consistent and still anonymous after all these years. The only constant in a cesspit of messy variables.
And there was Twitter. It still felt like an exciting place. Cycling journalists would break news, eager fans would react and chatter and the journalists would interact. When big stories broke or a major race was on, it was genuinely a joyous, thrilling place to spend time on. It’s obviously a big pile of steaming shite now and getting worse every day but back then it was full of interesting and constructive commentary.
Cycling Media was a rich tapestry to enjoy. Some of it was bollocks of course. Quantity doesn’t mean quality. But quantity did mean more quality than we’ve got now. And what have we got now? Why am I left staring at the articles trickling through and I’m feeling so bereft?
I should say, there is still a bit of quality around. Some articles I’ve read over the last month have been good and I’ve enjoyed and appreciated reading them. But a lot of them are not good, not interesting and not well-written. Instead of considered analysis or interesting interviews we get a mixture of listicles, previews, regurgitated press releases and paid advertorial for VPNs. This is ‘content’ at its worst. Content with no thought required.
Five riders to watch at the Tour de France Femmes!
Preview: What to expect on Stage 2 of the Deutschland Tour!
Patrick Lefevere happy with new signing: “I’m very very Happy”
How to Watch the Vuelta a España sponsored by NordVPN
These are articles which require very little intelligence. In fact, they are articles which only require artificial intelligence. It’s writing by numbers and literally now, a computer can do it. And increasingly I have no doubt that computers will be doing it. So why? Why has this happened?
Well it can be summed up in a word: Google
Google has fucked us. It has fucked the internet. And it has fucked up the state of the written word. Properly fucked it. Ad revenue on your website is supposed to be how you make money from the internet. I was never really involved with any commercial news websites back then, but I’m sure to some extent this was working for some of these websites. But as the years ticked by and as Google stopped being a search engine and started being a reward scheme for churning out moronic bullshit, the notion that people on the internet would find you if you simply produced quality writing, evaporated. Instead of paying more writers or paying writers more, websites had to hire SEO experts. I’ve worked with some great SEO experts over the years - decent people doing a decent job. But I utterly resent the notion that an SEO expert is necessarily an actual job in the first place. Full time employees working on gaming a grubby system where quality writing doesn’t matter. What matters is phrasing everything as a question now and using keywords which happen to be ‘trending’ currently. Fuck your editorial plan Mr. Editor in Chief, we have to tick these boxes if we’re going to rank higher than Quora and Reddit.
Something else that didn’t really exist in cycling media 10 years ago is paywalls, behind which is the only safe refuge from the SEO sludge machine. If you’re not beholden to Google and relying on ads, then you can focus on quality writing. Of the websites that existed back then that still, somehow, survive to this day, most of them are now behind some kind of paywall - Cycling News, Sticky Bottle, Cycling Tips (in its reincarnated form as Escape) and VeloNews which has been wrung dry by the corporate machinations of Outside. I don’t have a problem with paywalls. I am perfectly happy to pay for something if I think it’s worth it. Currently I pay for subscriptions to Sticky Bottle, l’Equipe, Dan Benson’s SubStack, Friends of the Cycling Podcast, Rouleur magazine and Discovery+. But a lot of people do have a problem paying for these things. I remember seeing an unbelievable Tweet from someone working as a cycling journalist and as a team press officer who watched live cycling on Tiz because, and I quote “I would never pay to watch live cycling”. That is an extreme example, but in general there is a problem due to a combination of being spoiled in the earlier internet days of not having to pay for anything and a growing concern across all businesses which is that of subscription fatigue.
One of the most interesting and exciting and paywalled ventures over the last few years has been the Escape Collective. They took the unorthodox move of asking people to subscribe up front for a website which they hadn’t even built yet. It seemed to work and anecdotally (judging by the general comments on their site), people like it and are happy paying for it. But even this, which seemed like a very exciting thing, is not yet profitable. According to a report the Escape Collective released on their site in May of this year, they hope to break even by 2025.
The problem then becomes something different. It’s no longer about SEO or about quality writing. The problem is one for the sales and marketing team. How? HOW do you get people to put their hands in their pockets enough to make something sustainable and profitable?
And my current answer is that I have no idea. Escape isn’t profitable. The GCN website was propped up with WBD cash. The Rouleur website is probably my favourite one currently, that’s subsidised by a print magazine which seems to be defying the trend of disappearing ‘dead tree’ publications. I don’t really understand how Cycling News is still going. Le Course en Tête was a great website with some of the best writers out there, but that proved unsustainable.
So now, if you wanted to start something, if you think you’ve got something to say and want people to read it, if you want to spend time on something but justifying that time means that you have to be generating revenue. What do you do? How can you do it? It currently feels impossible. Like I know I’m not going to make any money from this website, no matter how many new features I add. I know it’s just a hobby to stop me losing my mind in between trips to the dole office.
What is the answer? I’m genuinely asking. How can an editorial website actually work in this day and age?
Maybe the world has just changed and I’m Abe Simpson shouting at a cloud over here. Are podcasts and YouTube and fucking shorts and TikToks just what we get now and that’s just the way it is? Or is there a new hub of cycling writing and I’m just missing it because I don’t really look at Reddit?
It feels like there’s a big gap here. A big giant gap waiting to be filled by quality grown-up writing. I don’t want to know the answer to a question. I don’t want another race preview. I don’t want to buy a fucking VPN. I don’t want to ‘consume content’ in a never ending scrolling feed of chewing gum popcorn bollocks.
I want to read a well-crafted story by an excellent writer that I didn’t even know I wanted to read.
Am I on my own here? Does anyone else feel like this?
