I’ve finally gotten around to giving EC (podcast and written articles) a try, albeit at a slightly inopportune moment it seems.
Mainly taken me so long because I disliked Cycling Tips—it had fantastic photography but it was a bloated, slow, hot mess. I found the podcast bland and a bit too US-centric.
But EC has been a breath of fresh air. The podcast seems to me to have much more personality and depth, and the written articles are much better than the generic cycling journalism elsewhere.
Not sure why it seems much better—was there a layer of management or owners messing up CT?
CT hadn’t been fully independent for a long time, having gone from whatever the first sale was to Pinkbike, to collateral damage when Outside bought PB. No idea specifically how that impacted them (beyond Outside forcing them to take down the NFT critical article). Now they are more or less self managed with surely makes them more nimble IMO.
So how do people feel about the move back to only one level (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, check your inbox)? I have to admit I’m not happy about it. Bumping my cost 30% with zero new benefit has me feeling pretty frustrated. I HATE Discord, and as far as I can tell, that’s the only difference. When I realized there was a cheaper membership without Discord, that felt like a no brainer. I honestly don’t see how anyone gets anything out of it unless they’re checking it hourly to stay up to date, including overnight. It’s an endless disorganized random comment stream.
I’d have been a lot more comfortable with “we need the money and we’re going to fold without it” than “this change makes things so much easier for us to manage, PLUS, you get Discord, isn’t that awesome for you as a consumer?!?”
Cutting James AND raising prices? I’m going to have to seriously consider my next renewal.
I stayed at the same, higher level because I wanted access to me members-only pods, which I don’t think was available at the lower-priced level, so no effect for me. But I get the frustration. And I am sure the timing of this announcement was not coincidental as the Tour is about to start and their numbers skyrocket. Business is still gonna be business, I guess.
I would note that they didn’t appear to “cut” James, though…all indications are that he left on his own (for whatever reasons).
I still feel that I get my money’s worth out of the subscription, though….and by a fair margin. I listen to almost every pod and while I don’t read near as many articles as I would like, those that I do are high-quality.
My assumption is James was a budget issue. I could be wrong though as it’s truly just an assumption, and well, you know…
I don’t listen to many podcasts (any podcasts, not just EC) anymore and really only regularly listened to James. I also don’t pay much attention to road racing these days (hard to access, only a few dominant racers, I think we’re in the middle of what will become the next big wave of controversy) so a lot of that content is lost on me too.
I do get it for people who still consume that content though. It’s a good value for your use case and it’s high quality.
Challenging myself to dig deeper, I think maybe my biggest issue is nostalgia for “the old days when it felt like a small family that we were all a part of”. Sounds familiar here on the TR forum, right?
I’m with @Power13, I’ve been at the “discord” level from the start, though I never look at Discord for the same reasons you cite. I do enjoy the podcasts and find the content generally very good. I’m still waiting/hoping they add a new tech editor to replace James, I think the quality and quantity of their tech coverage has taken a dive since he left. Presumably they’re very focused on the Tour now, but they’ll need more tech/review content to get them through the off season.
TL;DR, I still find value in the membership but losing James was a blow.
After the crew had left, whoever was left as the editor allowed a Colin Strickland reputation washing article to be published on CT. That plus Caley was made to fire Dane Cash, not for cause, but because Outside as a whole was downsizing and spreading the pain across their properties.
I think those are the major direct effects. There will have been indirect effects that aren’t obvious to outsiders. For sure there was a lot of anger in the community when Outside took the NFT article down. Some people may have hesitated to re-up their subscriptions. I don’t recall this precisely, but there could have been a handful who said so on Slack (which we used at the time).
If anyone knows Robin Thurston, ask him how the NFT marketplace is doing.
One other point……I can’t stand the Discord channel. It is probably a generational thing, but like @Pbase mentioned, it is chaotic, unstructured and if you aren’t checking it constantly, seelomngly impossible to follow.
The best use of Discord I’ve seen is a more curated approach. I’m on a financial (stock market) discord where each expert has their own channel. When they post something, you’ll find it there. The general channel just ends up being chat and I didn’t even like chat going back to the AOL days.
Are people just guessing that James was let go due to budget reasons? The announcement made it sound like he resigned.
Same. I follow a handful in the sim racing world and they use a more specific channel layout that generally keeps on topic. I still struggle with Discord a bit vs a proper forum (old dog…) but the new stuff can work for me when it keeps at least some form of organization.
Yes, it’s clearly speculation that seems the norm these days despite clear (and logical?) statements by James (and other’s I’ve seen make similar choices in other areas recently). Seems like there must be a hidden reason for everything according to some people?
Where I’ve landed on Discord is that Discord with friends is great; Discord with strangers is not. And this one is not particularly good to begin with; I was there for a bit and it didn’t feel like a especially friendly or welcoming community, so there was even less incentive to hang around. I didn’t think it was worth the extra money at all
Also get zero value from it, including it in the list of features feels odd to me.
Its not so much generational, I’ve been using IRC for 20+ years because thats what the engineers at worked used. And I needed to pop in and quick and very technical questions. We were a virtual company - everyone worked from home or paid for their own outside office.
Every company is different, the new company is using Slack. Channels allow for focused discussion around topics (Discord supports this), and the Water-Cooler channel is fun and interesting to learn about co-workers you never see in person.
For cycling I’ve only used Discord a couple times (Evoq). It was fun talking smack on Discord during Zwift group rides with a local club.
unless randomly dropping in with a question for an organization/group/whatever that uses it for that purpose. In that case, get in, ask the question, get answers, and leave.
When Escape first launched, James posted on Instagram that he wasn’t going and he seemed a bit frustrated at the matter. They’ve never stated the reason. Maybe budget was an issue then. If it was, maybe they were able to get more funding, maybe they just took a leap of faith.
I think that those who are guessing that the current issue is budget are basing their guess on that older info. I mean, it’s not out of the realm of possibility, but James did straight up say he was resigning voluntarily. So I would treat voluntary as more likely than budget right now.
What did James say about his decision, why he left and where he’s headed? Did he say something that made it clear that there weren’t things going on behind the scenes? Not being sarcastic, but your response (especially when I already clearly said I was making an assumption and I knew that was stupid) seems like you’re assuming I know more than I do.
It’s all right there in his final podcast at the last mins or so. It’s been weeks since I listened, so I hesitate to paraphrase, but…
IIRC it was about making a change after many years doing this in one form or another. He said he planned to take some time off (doing nothing) and honestly didn’t know what he would end up doing.
Gotcha. I guess we heard that message very differently. Both making some assumptions based on our inner thinking. Definitely not clear imo, but since there’s no more info, I guess that’s as clear as it’s going to be.
Thanks I was curious. Just listened to the end, he said (paraphrasing) “I resigned a couple weeks ago and last day is the date of this podcast” or something along those lines. Then he planned to do nothing except hang out with kid(s) and walk the dog or something.
@Pbase sounds like he wanted a break, and can afford to take one. Dunno about y’all, but I’ve burned out twice in my career and quit jobs without having the next job lined up. Wife wasn’t happy at the time, we had young kids, but could see it was killing me and supported it.
