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Cycling Magazines

Posted: 5 May 2015, 7:07pm
by landsurfer
Just bought Cycling Plus. Don't usually. Never seen a more shallow "cut and paste" pretending to be original copy. Out of 218 pages only 46 are not adverts or "road tests" that are never critical... "Infomercials" is the phrase I believe. So for £4.99 I get a advertising brochure. . .
Are there any other mags out there that are catalogues masquerading as magazines ????

oh! The free tyre levers ... Seriously.....

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 6 May 2015, 8:57am
by NewHorizon
But you can't put a price on a Ned Boulting column! Bought the mag for donkeys years - on subscription its half the cover price - and, whilst it doesn't have much to do with touring anymore, there are still plenty of day rides I can dream about doing one day. Tried Cycling Active recently, but that really is aimed at beginners.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 6 May 2015, 9:43am
by Tangled Metal
I have bought a few and to me they all look the same. They are the cycling equivalents of a walking mag I used to buy called Trail. If you buy a year or two of that mag you tend to know what will appear in each month's magazine as they just re-hash each year's articles at the same time each year. I think the cycling ones (often owned by the same publishing house as the walking ones) are the same. Early spring edition goes about setting your bike up for the better weather and longer rides perhaps looking at sportives for example. Or late summer/early autumn they talk about winterising your bike and have mudguard and waterproof reviews. Am I right about that? Obvious really but then the advise articles tend to also give the same sort of advice each year.

I have seen a few like Cyclist and IIRC there is even a touring and an urban cyclist magazines too. Those look more stylish and seem more a coffee table poser type of magazine rather than the mainstream buy for a train journey and leave behind once read (in less than an hour) sort of magazine.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 6 May 2015, 9:44am
by Vantage
It dawned on me in the late 90's after being an avid MBUK fan that the mag was indeed just spouting endless crap and ads.
Anything you find in them can be found on the tinterweb for free.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 6 May 2015, 9:52am
by pedalsheep
I have had subscriptions to both Cycling Plus and Cycling Active in the past (when there was a cheap offer on) but C+ abandoned all the content that used to interest me and failed to acknowledge the existence of women cyclists. Cycling Active is more balanced but largely aimed at beginners and is mostly comprised of reviews of bikes I've no intention of buying. I'll flick thro in Smiths but can read the interesting content in 5 minutes.
Now that you can buy excellent touring narratives on Kindle for a couple of quid I'd much rather do that.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 6 May 2015, 9:11pm
by BE1
There is an increasing number of on-line or downloadable publications.

Here are a couple which, while being very different from each other, operate outside the tried and tested formats of the big publishers

http://www.velovision.com

http://www.theridejournal.com

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 6 May 2015, 10:21pm
by Sweep
I subscribed to cycling plus for a few years.

Even bought the binders :)

Used to be a good general cycling mag - broadly based.

Not all the articles were relevant to me, but i didn't mind - broad church etc.

Then rather a long time ago, doubtless pushed by the promise of advertising bucks, it seemed to become the preserve of sportive mamils obsessed with increasingly expensive and flimsy kit.

You can learn far more from places like this and other forums/fora/flora.

In fact this place is my favourite.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 18 May 2015, 6:46pm
by Sooper8
I'd rather read someones blog than the expensive pile of nonsense & adverts in some of those magazines.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 30 May 2015, 6:54pm
by windmiller
I find all cycling mags rubbish. The reviews are not really reviews at all just an exercise in toadying so that they don't upset their advertisers.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 30 May 2015, 7:01pm
by FarOeuf
I picked up a few copies of Bicycle Quartlery from the US. Not cheap, but makes UK/Europe magazines look like sales catalogues.

http://www.bikequarterly.com//contents.html

some articles are online in the form of a blog, eg : https://janheine.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/aerodynamics-of-real-world-bicycles/

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 30 May 2015, 7:57pm
by easyroller
You could try CYCLIST if you like broody, artistic photography of iconic mountain climbs... :wink:

All the cycling mags are pretty much the same though and all the information in them is available somewhere online for free! By the time you get any racing results or pro news it's all out of date and the "articles" are usually just thinly veiled advertorials for some product, service or place. I don't think this is just an issue with cycling mags but a lot of mags in general.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 1 Jun 2015, 8:32pm
by landsurfer
My grandsons comment about Cycling Active . . . "Did you pay for that catalog granddad?" . Says it all I suppose.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 8 Jun 2015, 9:30pm
by JohnW
I honestly don't find that any of the commercial cycling magazines are as much use or value to me as "Cycle".

I agree with all the negative comments made above.

The only commercial cycling magazine that I buy is "Cycling", and that's only after I've browsed through and decided that any one edition has a feature that makes it worth buying.............I sometimes also buy it during the TT season, to see the results.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 11 Jun 2015, 2:05pm
by Bmblbzzz
I remember Cycling Plus being a very informative magazine back when it started out. Around 1990 I think that would have been. It was a Future Publishing title back then when they were in a little office in Bath, might have been Trim St or thereabouts. Lots of informative technical articles, a lot on how to maintain your bike – quite useful, in fact – and all shot in B&W.

One I used to like a couple of years back was Cycling World. It, too, has changed and seems to be trying to adopt the glossier but less substantial image which (so far) seems to have been successful for C+, C Active, Bikes Etc, and so on. But it did use to have more articles about, well, people riding bikes, rather than, I suppose, bikes as objects. Bikes as objects are also interesting but there is only so much you can say in a magazine before it becomes repetitous.

Re: Cycling Magazines

Posted: 11 Jun 2015, 2:17pm
by NewHorizon
Even up to the mid 2000's, touring and camping had good coverage, and I bought my Van Nich Amazon on the back of their 'bike of the year' award in 2007, I think it was. Since then, the sportive boom has come along and swept away most of that, but it does feature some good routes. Perhaps with gravel bikes being the next big thing, it might all come full circle.