A Changing World
A Changing World
UP FRONT
David Edwards
THE MAGAZINE YOU NOW HOLD IN your hands marks a milestone in the history of Cycle World. In the 47 years since Joe Parkhurst hocked his boat, raided his savings and borrowed from buddies to put out Vol. 1, No. 1, we’ve published 563 issues and printed 66,298 pages (yes, I counted), all held together by three measly staples.
You have probably already noticed that the staples are gone, much to the dismay of the U.S. Postal Service’s highspeed sorting machines, which took great delight in munching covers. Kinda dilutes the reading experience when your magazine arrives in a government-issue plastic bag, cover sadly separated from the rest of the book.
No more. We’ve gone to “perfect binding,” publishing jargon for a glued spine. Hey, if it’s good enough for National Geographic...
Along with the new binding comes thicker cover stock. Much thicker. I’ll save you the detailed explanation, but paper thickness is described by “weight.” Last month’s issue went out into the cold, cruel world wearing a 60-lb. cover; this issue, at 106 lb., is armor-plated by comparison. In layman’s terms, CWs cover has gone from .06858mm thick to .1524mm, a 122 percent increase!
Any heavier and it would be considered card stock.
Inside, the paper upgrade continues, with pages going from 32-lb. stock to 40 lb. Besides simply feeling better to your fingers, the thicker paper will minimize “bleed-through,” the ghosting of text and images from the other side of the page.
We also took this opportunity to do a mild restyle of the magazine. Nothing drastic; we’ve all seen what happens when hired-gun design consultants jack a magazine up and slot in something that bears no resemblance to the previous product. Our goal is to surprise, not shock, the 300,000 CW readers-largest circulation in the moto-mag biz worldwide, thank you very much-who are obviously pretty happy with the product.
Still, the changes are many, from cover type to an expanded table of contents to new Dennis Brown column illustrations (the man refuses to fold a little Steve McQueen into my mug, no matter my exhortations) to simplified department leads, right through to Slipstream on the last page.
We’ve also reshuffled the order of the magazine, so that now Roundup, our news section, comes early, immediately after
my editorial. Do not fret, Eganites and Cameronians! Peter and Kevin’s columns are still an integral part of the magazine’s makeup; they now appear just before the feature well, with the option to run
more than one page each, as we did with Leanings this month.
You’ll also notice that New Ideas has been moved to after the feature well, now grouped with product evaluations and Service to loosely form an aftermarket-oriented section. With new-bike sales off roughly 50 percent in the U.S., it’s clear that many of us are riding out the recession with our current, used bikes. A brand-new model may be out of the question financially, but a replacement exhaust system, an electronics upgrade or new riding gear is still swingable. Our expanded aftermarket coverage will reflect that new reality. There’ll be more hands-on project bikes, too, like this issue’s “Web Surfer Special,” in which we utilized eBay and other discount sources, gathering the parts to build a $25,000 street-tracker for just $8000 out of pocket.
Speaking of cash, these improvements to the magazine did not come cheaply. Into six figures, the money guys tell me, fixing their gaze and tapping their pencils. This, at a time when a sour economy has eaten heavily into our advertising sales.
Neither do the improvements (nor the spending) stop on the printed page. Our cycleworld.com website is undergoing a redesign that should be complete early in 2010. While the magazine remains the Mother Ship-and will for at least another generation-the website will grow as an increasingly important follow-up in a 1-2 barrage of moto-info. For example, if you like the Web Surfer, then after reading the print story, log onto the site for a four-part series of “webisodes” on its build, with almost 100 extra photos and a video.
Plus, the website will be the place where hot news breaks first. Just as we’re playing up the mag’s strengths of in-depth coverage, lavish layout and high-quality photography, we’ll take advantage of the digital medium’s unsurpassed immediacy.
Have you been following us on Twitter @CycleWorldMag? While it’s easy to poke fun at the inanity of the popular micro-blogging network, we’re using it to file real-time reports and photos from press launches, races and the CW garage. As the accompanying photo shows, we’re also working on an iPhone app (go to www.cycleworld.com/apple for details) that would give users access to the best of print and web stories in one convenient, archivable location.
And not a staple in sight...
