Looking forward, never back

Dear readers,

This is my first real SubStack post and I'm not entirely sure what to write. But from experience with doing this thousands of times I know that if I just start writing, something will start to come out.

If I’m honest, I’ve written this three times now and each time I finish, something extraordinary happens at CyclingTips that give me pause and forces me write it again.

Like everyone else, I watched in awe from afar seeing person after person resign from CT after the lay-offs. To my knowledge, there are only a couple of employees left in the business now.

It pains me to see what has become of CyclingTips. The team we so carefully and thoughtfully put together is just a shadow of itself now and the new owners have never understood (nor have they asked) what CT's mission was, what made us different, and why we all get out of bed each morning. On one hand I’m proud of how I deeply embedded those values are into CT’s culture, but when so many key people are taken out at once I have very little reason to believe it will continue.

All that said, there are still hundreds of good and talented people working at Pinkbike, Velonews, Outside Online, etc who I want to see succeed and I wish them all the best.

Everyone has been asking me, ‘what’s next?’ I suppose that’s the reason you subscribed to this newsletter, but unfortunately I can’t answer that now because I still don’t know. What I do know is that I would love nothing more than to see the ex-CT employees and other talented journalists come together and create something new. Something that follows a new business model, has a fresh take on cycling content, and attracts an audience who are just as passionate as we once saw. Maybe a collective SubStack? Who knows…

For now, I’m delighted to hear my ex-colleagues Caley Fretz, Dave Rome, and Dane Cash’s voices again together in their new podcast ‘The Redundant Placeholders’ (I assume the real name is TBD). You can listen to it here on Apple and Spotify.

You can listen to it here on Apple and Spotify.

More to come soon…

P.S. Unfortunately my trusty editors are no longer here to proof my grammar, spelling or poor judgement so here goes: I’m pressing send on my first newsletter to thousands of people who have subscribed in the past couple weeks. Holding my breath…