I’m old enough to know better…
I should know better than to get together with a couple of friends to try and start a mountain bike magazine, published entirely with our own, limited funds – in a ‘flat’ cycling market. Only a fool or a dedicated fan of mountain biking would attempt such folly.
A magazine aimed at enthusiasts, especially one dedicated to those riders that actually ride, that actually go out in the rain, that actually wear out brake pads. This kind of magazine has been done before of course, many times, and failed, and it’s been done by big publishing companies with lots of resources too. Marketing departments. Ad sales people.
Proper offices even…
Even trying to get hold of some great stories and pictures – and to persuade writers, photographers and advertisers to invest time, effort and money into a project they’d never seen seemed like a ridiculous task.
Faced with such overwhelming odds, the chance of getting anything into print at all was minimal…
…which is obviously why I leaped at the chance of editing Singletrack. To help create something from the ground up, and to do it with a number of dedicated and talented writers and photographers who all believed in it – was something I couldn’t turn down.
We wanted to use the particular strengths of the printed medium and the internet to make a hybrid of both. The web is great for short, punchy news, reviews and interaction, but no one likes to linger over a news website for long. Magazines are a perfect canvas for longer, more detailed stories and features. Print is also the only medium that can do justice to good photography. And you can take magazines on trains and planes. Or into the loo. Or read them slumped on your favourite sofa. And they never need to be plugged in and recharged.
And so here you have Singletrack, issue one. It’s quarterly, it’s written by some established names and it introduces some new ones too. What you’ll find inside are some great stories and photographs. Stories to sit down and read – not just skip or skim. We’ve put a lot into the magazine, both figuratively and physically, and we hope that you’ll like what you see and read. After all, it’s a while until the next one.
So, please sit back and enjoy this issue of the magazine. It may be the foolhardy dream of a bunch of writers and photographers who lamented the passing of too many good magazines… but, damn, it looks good for it, and we reckon it’ll read well too…
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