Why does Citius Mag exist?

mannnnn....you'll some triflin bustas. Why you gots to be set tripping on da Citius Mag? Ain't no need to trip ya feel me? On da stremph! Thats my word, son!

You need to work on your Ebonics son!

I think Citius and Letsrun can coexist in different niches.

Citius is for the type of people who want to see open, honest interviews about training plans and race strategies.

Letsrun is for the type of people who want to complain that Citius doesn’t immediately open every interview with a pointed accusation about doping to the athlete’s face.

Citius is great for the sport. However, if LetsRun ceased to exist and nobody was willing to "risk it" when reporting (or speculating) on doping-related stuff, I would feel differently.

This new European correspondent is fantastic. I think that's what's drawing attention to this post more than anything.

If I scroll through my running podcasts on Spotify, though, it's evident that I have trouble engaging with a lot of the Citius Mag content. There are so many that I stopped listening to after 10 minutes, whereas I listen to every LRC podcast all the way through, and usually finish most of FloTrack's, too.

I'm a more hardcore fan of the sport. It's plausible that some people and some brands enjoy the overwhelmingly positive, narrative-based coverage from Citius. I still see a mismatch here, since these interviews with runners have almost zero crossover appeal to audiences comprised of people other than serious runners. I suspect a lot of the audience of Citius is women and other groups who feel strongly about transgressions (real and imagined) committed by LetsRun.

Eventually, if you need running brand support to survive and to keep paying that great European correspondent, how can you *ever* justify investigative journalism or the potential of running a controversial story or even mentioning a figure like Jama Aden? The gap here is insane, just last week Rojo was on the pod talking about the Moroccans who "stick the needles in their *** right at the track."

Citius and Letsrun both have a place.

Citius, treats the athletes with reverence, and makes them seem like bigger stars than they are.

Letsrun provides an outlet for angry post collegiate runners who can’t understand why they aren’t multimillionaires as a result of their 15 minute 5K PRs.

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Chris and Kyle are good writers, but Gault is the best track journalist by a mile.

Citius does good work, and the athletes actually like them, which is valuable because everyone knows the Brojos are weirdos. You have to wade through a lot of crap on here, but nothing compares to the wealth of running knowledge on these boards.

Citius Magazine is part of Nike and is advertising like the former Competitor Magazine.
Citius Magazine is not journalism. Citius Magazine is advertising.

It's a common Ad style from marketing class ;-) Personalization.

I can tell the obvious from CM but honestly it's common now for national federations, agents, sponsors, fan bois, and clubs to use Chat GPT to generate the first draft then re-arrange the words around to make it sound like you wrote it.

Citius' business model sounds like Flotrack a few years ago. Play nice with the brands.

Runnersworld for the more serious runner. It's got it's place in the running ecosystem.

they literally specifically state in their state of Citius podcast from last week that they are NOT capital "J" journalists. they are there to promote the sport and hopefully grow as a company. they are not going to ask hard hitting questions, that's not their angle.

Nike has to keep up with a fast chaning world. Nike deploying generative AI. As a result USATF has fired most of the Communications Staff we all loved to work with for ages and ages and ages. Nike will soon shutter Citius, RS, Competitor, PDX, and so on.

Love it or hate it, people come to letsrun for a reason.

One of the few places on the open internet where you can get real, unfiltered and genuine discussion about the sport. 80% (probably more) is total crap, but that last 20% ends up as important, PUBLIC, conversations about doping, DSD athletes, and shoes that other running media outlets, even communities like twitter, are too afraid to touch. (I do want to add that I think much of the discussion around those afermentioned topics on here is counterproductive much of the time. Anyone remember that thread about the runners in CIF that just ended up as a trans-bashing fest 7 pages later?)

Also, you can only really find immediate discussion about various events in the sport on here. Lets say a major runner gets popped. Letsrun? Immediate threads. Twitter? a few tweets by important figures in the sport that doesn't really inspire any real discussion. Discord? some discussion but good luck finding a discord server to talk about it on. Milesplit forums? does anyone actually visit those anymore?

Either way, Letsrun is truly the 4chan of the running world, and honestly it's just something the website needs to embrace at this point. To say this website is frowned upon by much of the running world would be an understatement, but people (including me) keep posting anyway.

By the way, shoutout to the Citius crew. They make consistently great content that really does help elevate the sport. Kyle, if you see this, keep doing what you're doing.

The fanbois come and go. USATF was able to get rid of their media staff and instead uses Nike affiliated uncompensated rich kid, formerly runners and track and fielders. Now Nike will dump Citius and other humans and will be using Google Bard, Chat GPT and dozens of other sites,

What are their real jobs? I was interested in knowing this

worst take ever it is people like you that want to keep track a small niche sport this is why you are dumb

Only because of the trust fund subsidy. Any other dot com media site blows up to get purchased or goes under in that time.

I like that they bring in some young and diverse talent for some things, but in general, i feel that they are largely run by corporate shills and sycophants.

one example just saw on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/citiusmag/status/1669067134670872587?s=46&t=TmZKTJlP5EZGQpQ6DTBqIQ

obviously tweeting this doesn’t stop them from running real track stories at the same time, but the tone is just so shilly that it turns me off it the publication even more.