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Last night I got up from my computer, at which I’d been surfing Cyclingnews.com and Velonews.com and so on, went in another room and sat down with a stack of monthly cycling mags I’d been accumulating.  Yes, sadly, this is how my Saturday nights often unfold.  After thirty minutes I’d flicked through three competing mags, front to back, and wondered if I should even bother renewing these subscriptions which, together, set me back more than a hundred dollars a year.

What got under my skin, was thinking about how bland and indistinguishable these magazines have become, and how the content doesn’t satisfy me and the writing seems not nearly imaginative enough.  It’s like needing to buy three meals at a restaurant so you can pick though them and find enough pieces to assemble a satisfactory one.  Rather than just rant about it, I thought I’d become part of the solution, and offer up my recommendations for how these cycling mags, both printed ones and their online cousins, can punch it up and give us all that we want on a single plate.  Further, I’ll even tip the hat to some organizations who are already finding that sweet spot, and encourage the others to give them a careful look.  

Getting to the point, below are the five essential ingredients, in my humble opinion, to great cycling publications:

-  Full-page, sometimes even-multi-page high-def photos from cycling races around the world, showing the agony and ecstasy of the sport set against unimaginably beautiful settings.  I’m not kidding when I say that I would buy and enjoy a monthly magazine that came with no articles, but just beautiful pictures, page after page.   Think of it as cycling-porn.  Call it Cycleboy or Pentbike, or whatever you want.  Just give me lots of those huge glossies that say far more than any thousand words could.  Some of the printed mags are doing better at this, while sadly there isn’t a lot of this going on online yet. Hint. Hint.  

- Realtime news in bite-sized portions.  Now, this is where a Cyclingnews.com or even, patting ourselves on the back, Bicycle.net, shine.  Tell me what just happened or got announced minutes ago, and please, keep it brief.  I want to be up-to-speed on who’s doing what where; I’m not looking for a doctoral thesis about it.  Remember, you’re eating into my training time.

- Humor, and more humor.  Make me laugh, and you own me forever.  Style-guy, in Bicycling magazine, gets it.  Fat Cyclist (fatcyclist.com) definitely gets it.  Even in the bowels of Procycling and some of the others, there are a page or two of funny stuff — but not nearly enough.  Cycling porn, and some satire that ensures we don’t take ourselves too seriously; that’s what I can’t get enough of.

- Non-fiction, done right.  I’m talking about training and tips and product reviews and so on.  Roadbikerider (.com) nails this.  Short passages, to the point, about stuff that matters to us, written concisely and in plain English, by people who know what they’re talking about.  I contrast this with product reviews in some magazines, like the one in which former racer Marcel Wust regularly mounts unfathomably expensive bikes and tells us about how they make him feel. I have to swallow a hefty dose of Pepto to keep my lunch down after I read his stuff, which often takes the form of, “The bike made my oversized and freshly oiled calves shine in the dappled sunlight as I flew effortlessly up the steep, twenty-mile incline, and when I flicked the front wheel around endless hairpin corners in a way that only I can do, and certainly you cannot, it made me feel that the universe, once again, was one with me…”  Oh, and I’ve been counting, and it seems that our center-of-the-universe friend Marcel has ridden a bike that wasn’t The Best Ever, exactly zero times.  Funny what happens when a guy only rides bikes whose price tags have five numbers to the left of the decimal point.

- Rider interviews, done right.  Okay, this almost never happens.  What we should get, are articles about what should make us really think that person, who happens to be a cycling nut like ourselves, is also an interesting person with some cool stories to share.  What we USUALLY GET INSTEAD, are the same questions the writer asked to everybody he’s ever interviewed.  For example, question number one these days, and tell me if I’m wrong here, is, “So what do you think about Lance’s return to cycling?”  Yeck.  How about, instead, asking, ala Bob Roll, “Tell us the [funniest, filthiest, worst, most painful, most embarrassing, etc.] thing that ever happened to you during a bike race.”  Question two:  “Tell us something even worse that you saw [or maybe just heard about] that happened to another rider during a race.”  Question three:  “What’s the worst you ever felt on a bike — your most terrible bonk, or that time you started the race in the cold rain, with just a light touch of pneumonia in your lungs.”  Those answers I’d love to have.  Instead, we get, “Which races will you be competing in this year?  How was your winter training?  How are you getting along with the riders and staff?” Blah, Blah, Blah.  Furthermore, while I love Big George as much as anybody, he’s not exactly the most engaging interviewee.   Us writers need to hover around some of the other guys in the pack who tend to say-it-like-it-is, in their mind, anyway.  Guys like Chris Horner and Dave Zabriskie, and Floyd Landis, you’ll never get a boring interview with — unless you ask them questions like what they think of Lance coming back to the sport….

Okay, there’s my Christmas wish-list and, as an occasional writer, my New Year’s pledge.  If you’ve got some ideas about where the cycling-writing is being done best, or worst, please comment below.