Issue 152 Editorial: I went into Publishing and all I got was this awesome magazine

Words: Chipps

Thirty years ago, at the start of January 1994, I walked into the Future Publishing offices in Bath to begin as technical editor for the recently launched MTB Pro magazine. My deputy editor Richard Howatt showed me around the basement office we shared with Mountain Biking UK and myriad Future buildings in Bath with good cheer, pointing out places like the photo studio and stationery department. 

He then showed me my Apple Mac Classic, with its 9-inch black and white screen, its 3.5-inch disc drive and its two installed programs: a word processor and an address book. Then he told me to get on with filling the magazine with the latest innovations in the mountain bike world, which at the time included elastomer suspension forks, clip-in pedals and bar ends in many colours. Around me, people talked on phones and there was a noticeable thrum of activity in the air. There was no discernible internet, no mobile phones, not even a decent digital camera – let alone a mobile phone with the internet and a digital camera… 

It was the early ’90s and print magazines were the source of news for everyone – their information, their entertainment and their inspiration for where to ride, who to try to ride like and what to buy. 

Obviously, in 30 years, things have changed massively. Those early bike companies have either disappeared, folded into bigger companies or become massive themselves (although many of the same faces remain). The internet has changed the face of the globe, making the world both smaller and better connected, and equally foreign and disparate-feeling.

And magazine publishing? You don’t need me to tell you how it’s changed. Even in the weeks leading up to me writing this has seen Cranked shut up shop, and then MBR too. An armful of UK mountain bike publications back then is now reduced to just Singletrack and MBUK. The States has seen a similar contraction, taking with it the authors and insights we used to enjoy. Many have now gone online, where there is a universe of content for the consuming. Singletrackworld is in the mix, too, with many features that were too numerous to make the print editions, or more niche, or too long, or too short. There’s as much again going on online, and that’s before you count our massive forum. 

However, there’s something to a print magazine, isn’t there? While all the information and stories within will be available online for the benefit of our digital-only subscribers, there’s nothing like that first flick-through, the waft of printers’ ink and the ‘Ooh, I’ll come back to that one when I get a minute’. With the internet, you know that you’ll never return to that page, so you have to scan it now before you forget. A print magazine will wait for you to be ready. 

There’s the whole ceremony involved in reading a print magazine. You might be a binge reader, locking yourself away with a tall, steaming mug of tea. Or you might be a dipper, saving a feature a week until the next issue looms. However you read something, though, the act of physically reading a book or magazine is different. When did an online feature make you stop and look up to ponder what you’d just read? When did you leave your phone open on a friend’s desk with a feature for them to read later? It’s a different way of consuming words and pictures, is print. 

What we write on these pages can’t be deleted, corrected or updated later (for better or worse). There’s a gravity to print that is still respected by both readers and advertisers. It costs real money to fill and print a magazine and it shows a level of commitment by the publishers (in our case, Mark and myself) to what’s in every issue. Our money is where our mouthpiece is. In the same way that a physical bike shop offers a perceived sense of solidness over an online retailer, so reading a print magazine, to me, feels more ‘real’ than consuming the same information on a screen with a thousand distractions a mouse click away. 

Thirty years ago, I worked for a magazine that shared a room with MBUK. Now I work for a magazine that shares a whole marketplace with it. We’re all that’s left of a massive mountain bike print world. What a crazy trip.