Running Times - Oct 2002

I agree with your take Mr Fabulous. I usually get on men's racing/RW online for the updated interviews.

I was mainly talking about print stuff here. I feel the same as many regarding the lack of good nuggets in various publications.

I have a friend that sends me copies of Athleics Weekly on a regualr basis. Even though they arrive a couple months late, I still enjoy reading each issue.

Scott, I am not surprised about the lack of budget you mention.

I say get Scott back as editor, clean house and make Jim Hage the first hire. Now there's a magazine I'd pay to read. Matter of fact, don't I still have some issues of R3 left on my subscription? RIP

Man, it's so depressing reading all this. I remember the days when RT, RW and Runner all had massive stories on the major races, along with massive WC/OG previews/reviews. I went through a bunch of Runner magazines from the 80s recently and was floored by how good it was. I didn't appreciate it then because that was the status quo.

Now we'd kill for a mag like that, but there are, apparently, too few of us who would. I guess the mensracing.com interviews and the like are the way to go now ...

I remember an article that was written by Tom Kennedy a few years ago about living and training with the Kenyans. He was a writer for RT that went to Kenya and lived their for a month and saw first hand how the Elite Track Kenyans trained before going to the European circuit. That was one of the best articles RT ever put out. They need more investigative reporting like that. Here is an idea RT. Send a guy to Northern Africa and investigate why a majority of the Northern Africans have been tested positive for banned substances. Who is their scientist behind the scenes?

But again, you get to the budget issue. If you happen to be going to Africa and reckon that while you're there you'll write an article about their runners, you'll likely find a magazine that will be happy to print it and give you $300-$500 for it. But if you ask a magazine to give you airfare and money for a few nights lodging and some meals and buy your article you're out of luck. Runner's World is probably the only publication that could fork out that sort of money, and since they've lost interest in running, it's unlikely they'd go for the idea either.

On the other hand, you can get an interview for the cost of a phone call and sell it for about what you can sell a feature article.

Fila did. And he was an employee of the mag at the time, so there wasn't the issue of spending two weeks to make $500.

I agree, the two articles he wrote after that trip were among the best things in the mag in the last decade or so.

I agree, this magazine has gone major downhill. There is very little substance in any issues recently compared to the "old" magazine.

Here is the built in irony of the running mag situation. How does a mag increase its revenue? By attracting readers and ads. How do they attract readers and ads? By publishing the same sort of pablum that most on the board seem to dislike. Have the mags gone downhill? I've read/had and tossed/collected RW, RT, TFN, Runner, Running, and American Runner, and for guys who want to run good times and get better, the answer is yes. For mid-packers, beginners, and gals, the answer is no. The current set-up is exactly what they want.

Seems to me the critical question that will make a large impact on the success of our sport is how do we nurture the millions of newer runners into runners who have a desire to get as good as they can get.

So maybe the question that needs to be asked is how do you make money on a racing or elite running magazine in this day? I think you have to market heavily to college and HS kids, then get some kind of ad/sponsorship committment that has some benevolence attached to it ... and/or do some really good market research to get the right advertisers.

THEN you also have to figure out how to position yourself considering the speed of Internet news and publishing time. Like others have said, you don't read such a mag for the results, but rather the insights that don't make it to the Net. Personally, half the reason I get T&F News is for the great pics ... even though you can now also get some of those on the Net. Still, it's nice to have a full-page glossy of your favorite star in this month's mag.

Finally, there's the historical aspect. If you collect t&fn, you kind of have a track history at your fingertips, and sometimes it's easier to look up certain things, even recent things, in the mag instead of the Net.

runners world has an interveiw with alan cuppepper, so I guess there up one.

It's funny that in the early 80's that Nike---then a 50 million dollar company--could put out a great magazine like "Running", but today Nike (worth 600 trillion dollars or so) does so little for the sport it was built on. I think any of us who were into the running scene in 1978-1985 could have verbally given a brief bio on any of the top 20 marathoners in the world at the time...with so little info on the top guys available today, that kind of knowledge on the top guys is virtually impossible. I remember The Runner having preview issues before the 1984 Olympics, with full profiles on each of the top men's & women's marathon favorites....with practically full articles on each runner. We'll never see that again....

If it's so hard to make $$ selling an elite-type runner's magazine, how does Marathon & Beyond make ends meet?

They don't approach the sport in the way that Running or the Runner or American Runner did. There's really no reporting in M&B, i.e., no race results and not very many topical features, not a lot of photos. They don't cover NYC or Boston, so they don't have to incur the expense of sending a staff to races like that. Essentially, two people do the whole thing.

Also, they aren't a completely elite publication. Usually there are articles written by five hour marathoners in each issue and I suspect that attracts a number of subscribers from the "masses" who wouldn't have been interested in American Runner because it seemed irrelevant to them.

One thing that helps is that neither the editor nor the publisher have taken a salary in the six years it's been in business. More minorly, they pay 10 cents/word, or $300 for a 3,000-word article.

Mew from MO wrote:

I remember an article that was written by Tom Kennedy a few years ago about living and training with the Kenyans. He was a writer for RT that went to Kenya and lived their for a month and saw first hand how the Elite Track Kenyans trained before going to the European circuit. That was one of the best articles RT ever put out. They need more investigative reporting like that. Here is an idea RT. Send a guy to Northern Africa and investigate why a majority of the Northern Africans have been tested positive for banned substances. Who is their scientist behind the scenes?

Certainly one of the best articles I've ever read in any of the running mags.

I believe it was Tom Ratcliffe who wrote the piece.