Cycle News is gone for now. Let's hope it can be revived somehow.
I’ll never forget the first day I saw it. It was at England Cycle on West 10th Street in Indianapolis. I had been riding my Honda CL100 up and down the trails along the railroad tracks on the Westside of Indianapolis getting roosted by the occasional Husky being tested after service from the dealership. I was probably 13 or 14 when I walked into the showroom and milled around looking at the Husqvarnas, Moto Guzzis and Yamahas. I ventured up to the parts counter and there it was… Cycle News.
I picked up a copy and started leafing through it and my eyes opened wide. Yes there was the occasional race coverage in the glossies in the mid-1970s, but here was cover-to-cover racing and the races just happened the week before! I was hooked. I dug deep in my jeans and fished out 50 cents and bought the issue. I rolled it up, tucked it in my pants and rode home to read it.
I don’t remember the specific race coverage of the very first issue of Cycle News I ever bought, but I recall a story about a Hare Scrambles race down at Stoney Lonesome in Southern Indiana and I recognized some of the names of local riders. If I recall there was an interview with a national rider and I became a fan of rider profiles, something I most enjoy to this day.
As a kid I didn’t have the bucks to subscribe to Cycle News (it was Cycle News East to be specific), but when I had an extra 50 cents I rode down to England Cycle and picked up an issue. It was the start of a love affair that lasted nearly 40 years.
That love affair just might have ended yesterday when Cycle News closed its doors after nearly a half century of being America’s motorcycle racing’s publication of record.
In the early 1980s – my very brief WERA road racing career ran into a little problemo called lack of funding. I really enjoyed road racing, the people involved, many of which were friends, so I thought maybe I could cover the races for Cycle News. Associate Editor Gary Van Voorhis gave me my first chance at covering a race and I’ll never forget the thrill when I picked up that issue with my first byline.
In nearly 30 years of contributing to Cycle News I guesstimate I’ve written over 600 articles, including everything you could imagine from race coverage, rider profiles, product and book reviews, obituaries and most recently I filed the Archives column for over four years.
So many of the journalist and photographers in motorcycling worked for Cycle News at one point or another. When I started there were still two editions, Cycle News West and East. I worked for editors Jack Mangus, Gary Van Voorhis, John Ulrich and Paul Carruthers. I only ever visited the classic old office on Signal Hill in Long Beach once or twice and never saw their newer office.
I, like everyone else involved with the publication, have ideas how they could have changed things to survive, but the bottom line is that Cycle News was a very successful and profitable publication that had a number of small things gradually mount up to catch it out when the Recession hit.
Times were so good in the 1990s and early 2000s that CN Publishing expanded and bought new offices with dreams of becoming a publishing giant. They bought the offices at the height of the real estate boom, so there was no opportunity to survive the downturn by borrowing on its property. When the factories largely dropped out of racing it affected Cycle News, a racing publication, more than other motorcycle books because of the drastic drop in win ads. Also Cycle News used to have the industry’s best classified ads. Free online classifieds wiped that out. Management also seemed slow and or reluctant to change the way it did business in the rapidly changing media landscape.
Perhaps more than anything time passed Cycle News by. How often have you heard someone say, Cycle News used to be the first place to find out what happened at the races? Well don’t look now, but that hasn’t been the case for better than 15 years.
Cycle News is not alone in the industry as a victim of the Great Recession. Buell most notably bit the dust, although maybe not permanently. And that’s my hope for Cycle News. I hope that somehow, someone can pick up the publication from the ashes and revive it. The industry needs a book like Cycle News and I’m certain it will be supported; maybe just not at the level the current publication is accustomed to.
I talked to one longtime publishing insider who said that Cycle News’ demise presents a tremendous opportunity for someone out there. The concept is still viable if a party can come in and run it more efficiently and creatively.
Let’s hope that a knight in shining armor is thinking about this and decides to come in to save the day for all of us.
