Wind and other things that blow kept my bike mileage in the double digits last week, which would not be such a bad thing if it weren’t for my addiction to the news.
After spending too much time in front of the monitor and not enough behind the handlebar I came this close (finger and thumb so close together that you couldn’t slip the homepage of the Albuquerque Journal between them) to canceling all my subscriptions. Bad news, badly written, barely edited, and poorly presented.
The motto of The New York Times used to be “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” At lesser journals wiseguys often revised it to “All the News That Fits, We Print.” In the Age of the Bottomless Internet it might be “All the News We Print Gives You Fits.”
Practically nobody needs to know most of this stuff, much less write about it.
“The rise of executive butlers.”
“At-home IV drips are the latest luxury building amenity.”
“We tried to pet all 200 dogs at the [Westminster Dog Show]. Here’s what it all felt like.”
Newspapers have always provided a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, of course. But once the sheer volume of treacle was limited by the traditional 60/40 ratio of ads to news, which constrained page count; editors’ desire to focus on what was actually important, like, uh, the fucking news; and publishers’ insistence that the final package turn a profit.
There is no bottom to the Internet, no satisfying its endless appetite. Ever fed a baby bird? Imagine one the size of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, but with a basement that extends all the way to Hell.
Whew. Now. All this being said, I have stumbled across two items you might enjoy reading over your morning coffee, shot of whiskey, or morning coffee with a shot of whiskey in it. And surprise, surprise: They both come from the godsend that rescued me from pulling an oar in the sinking longboat of daily newspapering, the wonderful world of bicycling.
First: The Washington Post presents a fabulous report by Peter W. Stevenson on Indiana University’s annual Little 500 bicycle race, made famous by the only cycling movie worth the price of a frame pump to put it into the ditch, “Breaking Away.”
It’s not clear who shot all the video and photos — Stevenson, a video producer, is credited on some, but not all — but they really help tell the story. And I love the still of the Kappa Alpha Theta rider hovering in midair over her saddle during a remount.
Second, The Cycling Independent gives us an essay by Laura Killingbeck, “A Good Time at the Dollar Store.” Killingbeck, free to explore after three months of housesitting, sings a soggy hosanna to the joys of the open road, a song I’m always eager to hear.
I’m supposed to do a short ride in the foothills with my fellow geezers this morning, but Killingbeck makes me want to strap some camping gear to a Soma and wobble off on a skull-flushing tour of wherever. Shucks, it’s not even sleeting here.
Mad Blog Media 
The Saga, aptly named, and panniers full of camping gear, vittles, and a good paperback. Now, that will flush out the ole brainpan! Maybe just an 24 hour, plus or minus a little, trip will do the trick. Where is the best campground, say in a 40 mile radius of Rancho Perro Loco?
Man, the whole touring thing was a lot less dicey around Bibleburg. More options right out the ol’ front door. NM14 between Tijeras and Fanta Se is a shooting gallery that actually makes I-25 look like an attractive option. The best bet for me might be south on NM377 to one of the campgrounds down thataway. That road has great shoulders, few blind spots, and a lot of bicycle traffic.
love the Little 500 story!
Good piece, hey? I’m generally dismissive of these multimedia deals, but that one was well done.
Laura Killingbeck…oh, if I were young and single….she had a great article an issue or two ago in the print edition of Adventure Cycling.
Speaking of which, I guess the print edition is about to go extinct except for an online edition and the possibility of a print edition, with a subscription fee that would empty out many a bicyclist’s checking account.
What gossip I’ve heard is not cheery. I hope Mike Deme’s ghost haunts these silly shits.
It seems weird. I don’t know the whole scoop but it seems they overextended.
What I don’t get is, there is definitely a market that wants to be served, but somehow they can’t make it work. Check out the magazine rack at your local grocery store. How can there be a dozen magazines based on the Chicks and Ammo theme, and the same number of custom Harley dead tree publications, but the bikey bikey people can’t make it work?
The bikey-bikey people want everything for free, plus a T-shirt and water bottle to honor their participation in the bankruptcy.
But this whole Adventure Cyclist debacle seems even dumberer than that.
There’s still so much good out there, but it’s just harder and harder to find.
The NYT used to be a great resource for education news, health and fitness advice, and even sports. Daniel Coyle was a regular contributor to their Play quarterly magazine, which did long form sports journalism before Grantland took a swing at it.
For instance, this classic:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/sports/playmagazine/that-which-does-not-kill-me-makes-me-stranger.html
But their day to day, Monday to Friday new coverage looks like they have handed the keys to middle schoolers and bots. Even if you excuse the poor grammar, clumsy prose, and questionable decisions on angles and perspectives (“These 12 Trump voters all put ferrets in their trousers. How do they feel about carnivorous weasels four years later?”), there’s so much that is just factually incorrect.
And we are not teaching smart media consumption in our public schools. More on that later …
Part of the problem at the NYT is that it croaked the copy desk back in 2017 or thereabouts. As you might expect, the desk was not happy, and now we are unhappy as well.
Meanwhile, NPR gets a new layer of editing called “the Backstop.” But is it a good thing? Don’t touch that dial. …
The Adventure Cyclist debacle must really sting the now former magazine staff. Carolyne Whelan took over as chief editor and bottle washer and overhauled the magazine a few issues ago. Six thick ones instead of ten skinny ones (magazines, that is), and more stories, etc. I found a lot of neat stuff to read lately. So when Adventure decided to croak the print magazine, I imagine the people who put a lot of sweat equity into its reinvention must have been fuming mad.
Looking at the staff roster, it looks kinda bloated and now they are into the Diversity, Inclusivity, and Justice stuff and hiring people to make sure the whole deal is sufficiently woke. That costs money, too. But when you are talking about people doing long distance touring using pedal power, I think the field self selects to a few weirdos, regardless of their pronouns, skin color, or accent.
Oh, well.
I didn’t get to meet everyone at Adventure Cycling, only the crew that hit Interbike every year and a few others, but I think Jenn Hamelman, the director of routes, may be the only person still on board who was there when I was flinging my shit against the wall. So, yeah, some changes over the years.
And it beats me what the thinking is there. “Print is dead,” I guess, which it very well may be. A couple of the newspapers I worked for and several of the magazines are long dead, and a few others are coughing up blood.
Maybe a copy of Adventure Cyclist doesn’t show enough “flex” on the coffee table when you have folks over for rosé and brie? But who can see you flex behind a paywall?
I guess the DEI chin music is inevitable, with all the old white guys dying off — they have to try to expand the customer base — but it strikes me as virtue-signaling on a par with the “In This House We Believe” signs you see on lawns in the Nice Parts of Town. If you were all that, maybe people could figure it out on their own, without the bullhorn and billboard.
But hey, I’m an old white guy, so whadda I know?
Yeah, those signs. When I was on the grad faculty in geoscience at the U of Hawaii, we were once asked to put up some sort of safe space signs on our offices so the students would know who was an asshole and who was not. I never put up a sign, but had non-traditional students in my office anyway. If it is real, or even half-real, you don’t need the billboard and bullhorn. People figure it out.
Man, I won’t even put a bumper sticker on my car. I don’t want people forming an opinion of me based on a couple-three words.
You wanna know what I think about something? Ask. Or hang around awhile; I’m bound to sound off sooner or later. Probably sooner.