Running Times - Oct 2002

amen brother this one was major crappy

It wasn't the best one they have put out but you can always be great. I have really enjoyed so many of their issues that one like this isn't that bad once in a while. Did you read the one with the Dick Beardsley v Salazar srticle? that one was absolutelt awesome.

joggers world had a good article on culpepper in it this month. no, i didnt buy it, just saw it at a friends house.

I had a different perspective on that issue. I was interested in those articles about the baby joggers and running during pregnancy as we have a 9 month old and my wife and I both run and she still competes. We plan on having more kids so reading about running during pregnancy was interesting to her. There is not a lot of information out there about competitive runner's and training while pregnant.

I could see your point, when I was single I would have felt the same way. Jonathan Beverly, the editor, has a young one so that is probably why the articles got in there.

Brian

PS: As a disclaimer, I do write some articles for the magazine

Grab an issue of Running Times from the 80's and grab one from last month. Two very, very different magazines. They used to actually cover races, big and small. Now they list the top 5 or 8 at major races and perhaps a quick 3 sentence blurb on the event. Whoopee. I suppose it reflects the shift in the mindsets of runners from the diehards of the 70's and 80's to the Gallowalkers of today. Big news here: Competitive runners and those following it (eg., those of us here) are in the extreme minority. Obviously RT has to market their magazine

to fit today's running consumer. For those of you in the northeast I strongly suggest a subscription to New England Runner. A true runners read.

These posts are indicative of the way racing is heading in the US and exposes reasons why many competitive runners are frustrated and at times negative. This was a magazine that was primarily reporting race results in the 80's. It now has becoming farther removed from racing and racers and more about the masses. Races are doing the same. I don't think racers truly have anything against Gallowalkers participating in races, but I believe they are frustrated with the fact that many races and now magazines have turned their backs on the 'racers' in order to give more attention to the joggers. Course accuracy, mile marks, reasonable entry fees, and awards have taken a back seat to participation, strollers, food spreads, and door prizes. Many races will give away thousands of dollars of door prizes, yet give the winners a trophy. Races and magazines should be able to cater to the masses WITHOUT forgetting the racers, or get out of the business of calling it a 'RACE', and call it what it is, a participation activity.

Amen brother.

- RT has to sell ads to keep the newsstand price below about $35 an issue. To sell ads, you have to deliver eyeballs of people likely to spend.Like Dr. Fullem shopping for baby joggers.

- To my experience, most such "door prize" raffle items are donated by organizations that would probably not write a check for prize $$. So no opportunity cost to the poor schlubs who win.

- Entry fees have risen with rising insurance and permit costs.

Not because I don't care about results, but because the Web has made printing results in a monthly national mag a waste of space. In the 80s, it made sense for RT to devote lots of pages to results; now even the little they print is mostly past old news by the time the issue comes out (usually a three-month lag from race to publication). Will we really care about, say, the Bix 7-miler next month, especially given that the mag isn't going to tell us anything we couldn't have known within 48 hours of the race?

Same thing with RT's continued devotion of many pages to race calendars. Used to be a great resource; now a waste of pages.

As usual, Joe is dead on. My whine is that just a few years ago, winners and age group winners would be collecting the cool door prizes for something called excellence. My mountain bike was a reward for winning a local 10K.

For many local studs, gift certificates or merchandise would be just as good as cash. I understand the economics and marketing of running events but I still hate to see the tubby walker go home with $100 gift certificate for running shoes while the winner gets a $3.50 plaque.

I lived a block away from Ed Ayres in 1977 when he started Running Times. He thought even then that Runner's World had lost interest in competitve running and he wanted to start a magazine that kept its focus on racing and racers. RT has probably managed to do that to some degree, but it is, as someone mentioned, mcuh less a racer's magazine now.

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be enough of us who are interested in serious competitive running to sustain a national magazine about it. Nike stopped publishing The Runner because it was losing tons of money on it, and Jim O'Brien, who was once the editor of Running Times, put out American Runner Magazine, a very serious racer's magazine, for a very brief time. It's gone now, I assume because it had too few subscribers.

Scott Douglas raises a good point. Periodicals are no match for the web. Incidentally I miss "Scott Speaks";

way too in-your-face for today's RT.

American Runner.... that was a great read. I should've kept those as they might have been an obscure collectors item by now. But, I think I cut out the pictures so that I could put pictures of just my head atop those people's physiques and put them on the fridge (smile).

I can kind of see your point. On the other hand, actual ARTICLES about how a race went down, tactics, etc., might still make a magazine worth printing on paper. The web is good on raw data, maybe even photos, but the analysis and prose still leave much to be desired. Heck, even the Johnsons haven't found a proofreader yet....

Just kidding, WeJO and RoJo... I appreciate the effort you're putting in to this.

But much harder to do in fact (write post-race articles still worth reading three months later). That's especially true because the budget for race coverage is so small (we paid $75 for a standard results article when I was the editor, and I would guess the rate has, if anything, gone down in the last six years). It's also tough because you're mostly at geographical mercy in finding someone to write the article--it's not like there's a large pool of good writers willing to spend at least one work day (do homework pre-race, go to race, then write about it) for $75 many places where big races are held. That's one of the reasons I tried to have elites write first-person accounts; that approach, too, was hit or miss, because the quality of those articles was all over the place.

Don't forget the timeliness, or lack of, for print magazines. It is hard to get excited over coverage of a major race that took place 6 months ago or longer. On the web, many times the results can be found the same day. It is hard to complete, so maybe they steer more toward the fluff?

I miss having more question/answer type articles with athletes. I'm going back a bit here (80's), but RW use to have monthly question/answer articles on VIP's in the sport...people like Salazar back in 1981...it could be with top athletes, coaches, race directors, etc.

I still see this type of question/answer session in mags like Rolling Stone, but seldom see this in RW/RT/TNFN. Is this too "easy" for journalism? Do articles have to always be features? I have always like the combination of both question/answers, as well as features. I feel like you get a better sense of the person from their entire answer to a particular question.

Scott, since your in "the know", I figured you probably have a pretty good take on this type of article. I would love to read a Q/A session with Webb/Radcliffe/Mo Greene, etc. in the next few months.

Thanks

Mike

Yes, I agree with Mike. Interviews are cool.

A nice alternative to profiles, especially when there might not be much more interesting about the person than that he or she is a fast runner. That's one of the strong points of mensracing.com and fastwomen.com. As always in magazines, space is a consideration--if you and I talked for 20 minutes and that conversation was laid out in a magazine, it would take more pages than the average feature. (Obviously, you can edit the conversation, but then you risk losing some of the flavor and interesting tangents.)

I think interviews are in some ways harder than regular articles, not "easy journalism." Look at most of the questions in RW Daily's "Brief Chats" to see how often interviews revert to boilerplate and softballs. ("So, were you happy to win the Olympics?" "Do you hope to run faster?" etc.)

RT, especially, should do more interviews in lieu of profiles now that the mag no longer pays travel costs. How the hell are you supposed to do a good profile of someone without spending a good amount of time with them? Most people would be surprised to learn how little money there is in writing for the running mags, and how little of a budget editors have to produce each issue. Example: I got to cover the 96 Olympics for RT, which was obviously great. At the time, I was self-employed as a freelance writer and editor. I was in Atlanta for nearly two weeks, so other work (the nonrunning stuff that paid the bills) wasn't possible. RT paid for my plane ticket, and I got $750 for the article. (Side note: They no longer pay anyone that much.) I had to find my own sleeping arrangements (crashed on the sofa of an acquaintance who lived in the Atlanta suburbs) and pay for my own food. In other words, I lost money on the deal.

For the record, I might be in the know, as you say, but I'm certainly not in the in at RT. I get to do like one article a year, and have no input on the editorial content.