i've never been a fan of velonews anyway but very sad to see the continuing gradual degradation of cyclingtips which until recently was in my mind far and away the best cycling news website. i'm currently a veloclub subscriber - its the only time i have ever paid for a news site, despite that fact that it doesn't really get me anything extra, i just wanted to support a great site. i can't see myself renewing that again.

CT's RSS feed hasn't been working for a while either which limits my visibility of their articles, not that there have been many recently (partly due to the off season but i suspect only partly, the old CT would have found interesting things to write about).

so, where is good for cycling news now?

That one, at least, isn’t from malicious corporate decisions. They changed the URL a few weeks back to http://www.cyclingtips.com/feed from the oddball aggregator URL they were using before. My reader (NetNewsWire) still only loads the first image in the post/article (barring stuff like Twitter embeds), but it works fine otherwise. They didn’t exactly publicise it, though; I only saw it in the internal VeloClub support Slack channel.

It was unfortunately 12% of the entire workforce at Outside, with large hits on the editorial and content sides of the house.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

yeah, i always put that down to simple reduced competency
thanks - at least now i can easily see that there is nothing worth reading

We have some exciting things we are working on too :)

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E-DUB
Chief Janitor @Slowtwitch
Life is short. Dont be mad all the time.

Good to hear Eric!

I wouldn’t mind if one of them was the ability to upload a pic from my phone to a post without hosting it elsewhere. Could never convince slowman to do that. Haha

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Matt

I know we journos are not a popular bunch, by and large (and we bring a lot of that on ourselves as a group) ...

But these are great people and excellent colleagues who have done a fine job. Cycling is the poorer for them not writing about it.

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"Find a way, not an excuse". Goony, Kona, 2009

Is it accurate to say ST is unique in that a very large percent of its content is written by its readers ?
Doesn't this make a much leaner organization, less susceptible to advertiser activity highs and lows ?

I would say it is more or a community engagement site then all the others.. We dont just "PUSH" information and news to our community. We talk about things. Together.

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E-DUB
Chief Janitor @Slowtwitch
Life is short. Dont be mad all the time.

https://dumbrunner.com/...runners-world-editor

“Sometimes it's like you have a paywall around your heart,” Meredith Logue, 27, told her boyfriend of eight months, Dickie Greenleaf, 33. “And I feel like I’ll never get unlimited access.”

Greenleaf is an editor at Runner’s World magazine; Logue’s remark was an apparent reference to that publication’s decision to put a paywall around some of its online content.

“I don’t want just bits and pieces of you, Dickie,” Logue said, sobbing. “I want it all, I want the premium content. And you keep it locked away!”

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

It's regrettable to lose the coverage, but I've scanned open articles on Velonews time to time but largely when hitting a paywall am like "pshhhh, nope" when I can click over to road.cc for free.

Thing is, if there was a monthly glossy physical mailer with some cool full page photos from events or something, sure............but some of the stuff I've seen these places the photography and content is not what I'd consider pay worthy.

Instead, I blew about $75 on a "new old stock, lost in the book store" copy of 40 Years of Cycling Photography. A superb spend for what it is.

If someone sold a $50-ish year-in-review book for pro cycling or something (or for runners), I would buy that.

These paywall site things I often just shake my head.

thanks. Always interesting to see where things are going.

The problem is someone has to write all that content, both free and paywall. The paywall is the way those writers get paid. Ad dollars aren't as great as most think they are.

The problem lies with us, for not paying for premium stuff, and to a degree with the sites for depending on the premium model/not coming up with a model more people are willing to shell out cash for. Although I don't what that better model looks like

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

I agree, though I don't think that's necessarily true at CT - the VeloClub system seemed (from the outside, and as a member) to be robust and successful, and these changes have more to do with the Venture Capital Vultures at Outside than anything else.

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I wrote this, you should read it:
https://www.slowtwitch.com/...n_Swimming_6700.html

Yeah, maybe they fired the wrong 12%. My first beef with Outside was when they forced CyclingTips to pull an article that lightheartedly poked fun at Peter Sagan's NFTs. I think the title was something like, "If Peter Sagan Can't Sell a Cycling NFT, No One Can."

Presumably to protect their surreal NFT marketplace "Outside.io." - "And everything's designed for less screen time and more outdoor time." Uh-huh.

I presume this isn't going well given right now they have appear to have two NFTs for sale, one for ~$6 and one free. Maybe the truth of the CT article title hit a little too close to home.

I wonder if the NFT game not going well is what's triggering the gutting of the content creators.

It's an interesting question, how to pay professional journalists and professional artists in the digital age, I don't think Outside has found the right combination there. (And I had subscriptions to both Outside+ and VeloClub)

Yes. This 100%.

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no sponsors | no races | nothing to see here

It's a hard ask for us to "pay for the premium stuff" when it reads like ad copy to begin with.
Maybe that's a chicken/egg thing?

Maybe generally, but referring to the subject of this thread, I believe the CyclingTips VeloClub was a success, and a pioneer in a paywall for cycling content that still allowed reasonable access to free content. Combined with high-quality ads. Cyclingnews and Velonews followed suit.

Once CT was purchased by Outside what seemed to be an success seemingly started to go downhill.

I'm not taking the blame for Outside, here.

Yes, but only if you rely on expensive, largely inefficient editorial staff to write your content.

There are ways to leverage other's content. IMO, content is king, so you better be pretty smart and effective in how you get it

Then you have the case where the better writers don't write exclusively for one publication/media family, or they don't even write at all anymore, they do podcasts [maybe?]

The hacks come in to fill the vacuum, and content suffers

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

As I've posted before, since I don't keep any sorts of Journal, and my Blog is long dead, this is where my "archives" lay
I'm sure that when I pass away, one of D'Kid's friends will ask "Didn't your Dad have a story about ...?" and she'll answer "Yeah, I don't remember all of it, nor the exact way he told it, but it's probably on Slowtwitch someplace. Look in the 'Shit My Pants' or 'Weirdest Thing You've Seen' threads"

But that's probably NOT the content to which you're speaking

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

As long as James and Ronan are still there, I will keep paying for access to cyclingtips.

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wovebike.com | Wove on instagram

This is exactly right. The notion that we’re entitled to free content started with social media. It’s a similar scenario to people not wanting to pay for streaming and using VPNs. It ultimately hurts the quality of media available.

All publishing takes money—a plane ticket to France to cover the Tour is not free. Ad dollars have become harder and harder to come by as brands decided to plow dollars into paid social & digital, as well as content creation for owned channels. At the same time many publishers were slow to adapt to this and what they offered and continued to rely on ineffective banner ads and that kind of thing. Affiliate marketing then came along to replace some revenue but led to a decline in unbiased reviews (which was always somewhat of a thing; brands would threaten to pull ad dollars as a result of unfavorable coverage). It’s a combined spiral, and kudos for Slowman for a model that continues to work.

The Outside stuff is a little different. They created a data & customer ecosystem with digital & streaming publishing (from cycling to ski to food to health to yoga titles), BikeReg, FinisherPix, Gaia and so on. All stuff many use under one roof, essentially a giant data pool to monetize. But they’re struggling with a compelling offering and IMO, spinning wheels on stuff like NFTs. And what I don’t get is why they bought a bunch of bike titles and proceeded to tank them (Peloton, Beta, now CT?). In typical private equity flash, they have a fancy downtown Boulder office that the lights will stay on at at the expense of a lot of good people losing their job. Next year is going to be rough with he economy and some titles would have/will fold, but it seems very short sighted or perhaps cutthroat to have gobbled them up and eliminated competition.

So for a new bike review do you want to rely on a brand’s marketing job department to tell you about it, or have a mostly unbiased review?

Same for Kona or the Tour. Can you drop a newbie into covering the race with no real understanding of the athletes, course and history? Sure. Will the coverage most likely suck? Also sure.

Someone is creating the content and someone is paying for it, no matter where it originates. At least good stuff, there’s plenty of junk around for free. To your point of sourcing from others, that happens all the time with “stories” being written from a social post. That’s not editorial, it’s regurgitation for the sake of clicks.