The creative destruction continues among the print magazines as Cycle News, the long running California based print publication, best known for coverage of motorcycle racing, closed its doors on August 31st. This long running shakeout has been harsh and any printed magazine or newspaper slow to come to grips with the Internet is likely facing a similar fate. Paul Carruthers, Cycle News (recently laid off) Editor-in-Chief, confirmed rumors of the shutdown.
Cycle News is familiar to anyone who has been involved with motorcycles and motorcycle racing over the last four or five decades, but when the online world offers many of the same things your print publication does, only faster and often for free, your print model needs to change. News of all types is becoming a widely available commodity and motorcycle magazines are certainly not unique, even the largest circulation newspapers and magazines are trying to figure out how to adjust, and if the adjustment takes too long, the doors close.
Shutting down the presses could be an opportunity for the folks at Cycle News who have lost their jobs, although I'm sure they don't feel that way right now. If those same individuals decide to transfer their talents to the online world, without the overhead of the print publication, they might be able to make a go of it. Easy? No. Hard work? Absolutely, but definitely possible.
I wish all of those affected by this closure the very best going forward.
Link: Paul Carruthers via MotorcycleDaily
Link: Cycle News
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Damn shame, they were a great print operation that served the racing community better than any other single source, but got on the online wagon a bit slow. Unfortunate they couldn’t make the new business model work. The moto would has lost a another legacy…
I hate to see it, but it’s a reality we’re going to have to get used to. We are one step closer to a virtual world. Next will be motorcycle shops. Why go look at bikes when you can do all your shopping on line? After that, motorcycle shows. Just stay home and view pictures of the show (bikes, booths and people), on the Internet while you eat Cheetos and drink your Big Gulp.
For me, I’ll stop building bikes and just draw pictures of them or perfect my Photoshop skills.
Hey Mule nice bike featured! I wish I had the funds! You ever build KZ1000 based hot rods? The publication is shutting it’s doors but Carruthers will get picked up be a print magazine. As far as the staff they are truly in a changing environment and have to really hustle to maintain their careers! Good Luck gentlemen! And Ladies!
When I worked in bike shops, the high point of the week was usually when the new issue arrived. It must be a bummer to not have that to look forward to anymore.
Another print medium gone, too bad. As with many here, I have a very extensive collection of motorcycle magazines that span almost 20 years. I go through them from time to time to purge the less interesting ones to keep the collection from getting out of hand. I enjoy the ability to page through them and also have them for reference material.
These magazines will last as long as I want to keep them, or until the paper disintegrates into dust, a time capsule that can be revisited anytime you wish.
I’m not quite sure how the internet works as far as archiving old material is concerned, but it seems to me that material on the internet is not stored forever, rather stored for as long as the owner of the server wants to keep it.
hate to say it but Ive alway thought the american mags pale in comparison to what you can get in the UK (Bike, PB, etc.). It seems to me once I was able to get these in the sates I never looked back to cycle world, I always though the articles were more like ads for the new models and there was never anything on bike that people actually owned. I mean every month BIKE is doing spreads on mid 90′s sportbikes or something relevant to the average rider.
@Gordon, “I never looked back to cycle world,”
Cycle NEWS, not Cycle WORLD.
I’m gonna have to agree with Gordon. The US mags always seemed to be several pages of bike related material hidden in volumes of advertising.
Personally I can’t see a magazine like PB going under because of the interweb-thingy. You just can’t get the same feel, range and depth in most online articles without excruciating amounts of searching on the net(no offense Paul but I use the kneeslider as a supplement to the mags I buy for fueling my obsession, still doesn’t stop me from opening up your site every morning hoping for a new article)
Why do I need a motorcycle magazine when I have The Kneeslider?
Like Classic BIke is not overflowing with adverts!
merlin said it! i subscribed to cycle news from 1976 to 1982.always looked forward to the adds and the tests on the latest bikes. i remember the demise of Laverda motorcycles and the further of fast yet simple bikes that adorned their printed page. hoist one to days gone.
I look at this from a different perspective. My husband has been a subscriber for years.
I have found myself looking forward to checking out the pages because of it’s great design, headline treatments etc. Cycle News has been a quality publication. It’s hard to appreciate this type of design in the fast paced digital world.
This news is sad news in our house.
rs, Most of us greatly appreciate and enjoy the offline world of print magazines, but online or offline, change is constant. Some new print magazines have actually started over the last several years and seem to be doing fine. Unfortunately, Cycle News held too long to their original mission of printing race results while the world around them made those old news by the time they arrived. They were changing and working hard to catch up but never quite got there. Add in the slow economy and it’s over.
A last note on their website indicates they might try to restart with a new owner if one can be found. While there’s certainly a sentimental attachment to the publication among many, that won’t pay the bills, they need to find their niche in the current publishing environment and focus hard. Doing more of what they were doing before won’t work.
if you want to kill a magazine, go on line
I weep for the future of moto-journalism. When a top quality publication like CN cannot keep, let alone increase, its subscribers for only $50 a year, I see no hope for anyone else. I lost my job and I cut every expense except food, rent and my CN subscription. I even turned off cable because I was getting all my motorcycle racing news from CN. That’s how much I believed and treasured CN. Goodbye CN. I will miss your top notch coverage of all things motorcycles.