Like a longstanding WorldTour team, Cyclingnews has evolved into different forms and worn different colours since it was created in 1995, yet it has always been a constant in the world of cycling.
This year marks another exciting moment of change for us, which will play a big part in how people enjoy our content, and how we choose what race coverage, news, features and analysis we produce.
Many of you will have noticed in recent weeks, as you visit Cyclingnews more frequently, that we have introduced a digital subscription. Once you’ve viewed five articles in one month, we will ask you to take out a digital subscription to continue reading our content. The next month, that limit resets.
This is a big shift for Cyclingnews, and we’re thrilled to say that our digital subscription has so far been a startling success. Thousands have already joined us as members and contributed to our journalism. Our deepest thanks to all of those who have done so.
Alongside our digital subscription, the team of journalists at Cyclingnews has changed. I joined as the new editor of Cyclingnews and longtime contributor Alasdair Fotheringham has joined as a full-time staff writer.
Joining the Cyclingnews team has been a steep learning curve and a humbling experience for me. The global team works tirelessly to deliver the best reporting in the world, and the audience responds in kind, with extremely frequent visits to Cyclingnews and avid engagement with our community.
Cyclingnews defies the modern rules of digital content, receiving an unprecedented amount of loyal direct visitors, rather than via search and social media. Again, thanks to all of those who visit Cyclingnews so frequently.
We cover a broader range of subject matter than any other cycling website, and we do it with far more expertise than can be found elsewhere – courtesy of a team of journalists with decades of cumulative experience between them.
That’s no easy feat, and we work hard to achieve it. Cyclingnews is typically a 24-hour operation. We have permanent staff across Europe, North America and Australia, enabling us to cover all critical news as it happens. Our full-time staff covering racing include Patrick Fletcher, Barry Ryan, Stephen Farrand, Daniel Ostanek, Alasdair Fotheringham, Laura Weislo, Kirsten Frattini, Jackie Tyson and Simone Giuliani, plus a host of talented contributors.
So what can you expect going forward? With millions of visitors each month coming to thousands of pages, fuelled by hugely varied interests in our site, there’s no easy way to sum up what Cyclingnews will offer to every reader.
Here’s an idea of what you can look forward to in the years to come.
The next chapter
First and foremost, Cyclingnews is the global reference point for pro cycling. That has been the case since Professor Bill Mitchell founded the site in 1995. That won’t change.
We will continue to attend and cover the vast majority of all professional road races, while covering an increasing amount of gravel, cyclo-cross and the biggest mountain bike races.
This global coverage and race presence will be reliant on our subscriber income, as many of the smaller races we attend simply don’t attract the same attention as the biggest Classics and the Grand Tours do.
Similarly, we want to continue to tell the very important stories, produce the best race analysis, offer the most revealing interviews and tackle the sport’s most difficult issues. These stories matter to our community, and our digital subscriptions will allow us to invest even more in them.
Beyond news, though, our insight, feature content and commentary will become more and more central to what we do.
During the Classics season Fabian Cancellara was our dedicated columnist, delivering analysis and entertainment throughout the cobbled Classics and monuments. As the Grand Tours ramp up, experts such as Philippa York, alongside guest bloggers like Joe Dombrowski and gravel racer Nathan Haas, will deliver more in-depth and insightful analysis than can be found anywhere else in cycling.
In women’s racing, we cover the women’s peloton more than anyone else. This year we will make our biggest investment ever in women’s racing content, with Women’s Editor Kirsten Frattini and other journalists travelling across the Atlantic to cover the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in person. We will also attend the Giro Donne and other races to offer the content that is impossible from a distance. We have also committed to more live coverage and more in-depth reporting in women’s cycling, for which we’ve already seen impressive year-on-year growth.
In the last few years we’ve dramatically expanded our content around bikes and tech. We have a talented dedicated team of tech journalists covering the latest launches, reviews and delving deep into the stories behind brands – from breaking news on business developments at tech giants to sit-down interviews with figures from the industry.
Our full time tech team includes seasoned tech editor Aaron Borrill, our breaking tech story specialist and authoritative senior review writer Josh Croxton alongside review writers Will Jones and Mildred Locke.
When it comes to understanding the very best bikes of the WorldTour peloton, or deciding on your next bike or component purchase, Cyclingnews will be your authoritative source. Much like with our coverage of pro cycling, we hope to offer some entertainment along the way, too.
Generating all of this content comes at considerable cost, and so we still need to generate revenue from other sources (for the time-being, at least). You’ll still see advertising on the site, we will still earn some commission from e-commerce transactions you make based on recommendations from the site, and we will continue to work on content in collaboration with brands. The latter will always be in the form of clearly marked advertorials or supported articles – as our editorial independence is critical to our core principles as a brand.
Naturally, we want the experience of using Cyclingnews to constantly improve, and you can be assured that we are persistently working on this. Particularly for those paying a digital subscription, we will endeavour to make our pages clearer, faster and visually more appealing. But these changes must be done with care and understanding and so can’t happen overnight.
As we embark on our next chapter, our committed readers will be more important to us than ever before. With our audience paying directly for our content, we feel a greater obligation to begin a conversation with you about what you want from Cyclingnews. So please reach out to us on our social media channels - Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and on email at cyclingnews@futurenet.com.
As paying members, this isn’t our site, but yours. So tell us what you want, and join us on the journey.
Thank you for reading.
