They need to have people on the ground, but I think it is a fair point to question the * amount* of people they have on the ground. It seemed a bit overkill for Holy Week.
You can’t just cover a race from watching online coverage. You need people there walking the pits, talking to personnel, riders, etc to get inside storylines.
Was it ever revealed who the Secret Pro was? Wondering if it was ever disclosed with the split up.
I believe there was more than one.
I always assumed the “Secret Pro” was an amalgamation based on anecdotal input from multiple unnamed pros and semi-pros and never an individual “real” person.
They’ve said it IS a real person before, but who knows
Link to Velo: https://velo.outsideonline.com/
Press release from May: https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2023/05/04/outside-interactive-inc-announces-launch-velo-new-cycling-media-outlet
When I consider this statement:
Blending the legacy of more than 75 years of experience in cycling media across VeloNews, CyclingTips, and Peloton, Velo will combine all aspects of these historic brands with the goal of getting more people outside and on bikes. The new site has a target launch date of June 1, 2023.
I don’t know that this is strictly true. They created a site de novo. They fired all the old journalists. They bought the IP of all 3 previous sites, but I’m not sure they are actually making use of that IP because of the discontinuity in personnel. The brand equity of the parent sites also got vaporized (or in some ways it transferred to the Escape Collective, for people in the know). I mean, I could phrase this more bluntly, but I figure I should be a bit nicer on the internet.
Edit: I previously said that Velo took all the older articles off the internet. This isn’t true, at least not totally. At the time this was edited, I am having trouble finding some but not all of the older articles. I don’t know if they migrated everything after a certain cutoff date, or if they are trying to migrate more but the process is ongoing. At least some articles from 2020 or later are still on the site, for example.
Wild. They didn’t move all the old VeloNews and CT articles to the new site?
OK, I am mistaken. They have migrated a lot of articles to their archives. I could have sworn that a few days ago, I was looking for an old CT article, and I found it on Google but the site returned an error when I entered the URL.
So, my bad: they did not simply vaporize all the old articles. A bunch of articles from 2020 or later seem to be working, like this one from 2020. I’m browsing incognito. Maybe they are in the process of migrating the old articles to the new site. I don’t know what the cutoff date is. However, this 2019 article about a repaint of an older Biachi Oltre XR2 returns a 404 error at the time I’m writing this.
I honestly wonder how much money Outside Inc has lost on all these deals. They destroyed multiple brands and nobody loves them anymore.
Do the Pinkbike riders also hate them?
I dunno. Velo is Outside’s new brand for drop bar bikes. I am guessing that PinkBike thinks/hopes that they will be left alone to do their thing in the MTB space. The problem with that is obvious: Robin Thurston might have another ill-advised brainwave and decide to do something in the MTB space.
Judging from the PB forum, yes they also hate Outside.
I’m with them, but having said that, don’t they kind of hate everything on the PinkBike forum? 
I wouldn’t say they hate everything. I would say they have low tolerance for BS.
Outside related, there is a pinkbike user ‘notoutsideceo’ that is hilarious.
After being consumed by the Outside, BikeMag appears to have been sold off and risen from the ashes.
A (new) article from BikeMag popped up this week, the brand and old content are now under the ‘Arena Group’ ?
To create original content, they’ve decided to propose a new standard - weighing bikes without wheels. Visionary! However the content is a lonely island swimming in a sea of display advertising - I’ve never seen so much OutBrain irrelevant advertising dumped on a page.
I don’t think BikeMag was ever owned by Outside. The Arena Group is a motley crew of last-gasp dinosaurs like Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal, and more niche titles like Surfer and Skateboarding.
So you think this is the PE business model?
Just how do you think this makes money for the PE firm?
Do you think PE guys like spending money to buy a company and then gut it because they like throwing away millions of dollars just for kicks and giggles?
Or do you think that maybe, just maybe, there are rational business decisions at work and the sad fact is that with so much information available for free, not enough people want to actually pay for otherwise quality sites to make the site a viable business.
Clicked on a velonews link and got:
Infinite loop detected
INFINITE_LOOP_DETECTED
You must have missed that Escape Collective was massively successful and fully funded the whole enterprise from private subscriptions in like a week.
100%…at least for many firms. They try and slash costs to the bone, raise prices where they can in order to show a quick financial improvement and sell the company. This is not a new strategy, or even a surprise. Consolidate services, cut costs and sell. Almost no PE firm buys companies for the long-term.
I have opined many times re: the need for readers to pay for journalism, as well as the mistakes media has made by giving away content for free…however, the previous CyclingTips and the current Escape Collective (along with other groups such as DNVR / CHGO Sports, The Athletic, et al) show that people will pay for good content.