Bicycling Magazine Subscription

Update: Due to a request from an uber-reviewer here, more basic mag details are added. The monthly issue, 9 issue a year, figure that one out, comes on time. Its usually about one hundred pages but more in the summer. I can rely on about a half dozen paper inserts for subscriptions, which zing to my recycle bin. Most photos they use are run of the mill but when someone like noted cycling author Sam Abt is in the issue the photos are outstanding. A beginning cyclist can use issues to review equipment lists, read editors opinions and get elementary knowledge, but unfortunately not much else. The magazine lacks consistency, flirts with sexual innuendo, and dedicates a lot of pages to fluff, ads with no use other than to tout the latest and greatest. For example on a recent cover the byline screams in red about Mario Cipollini's fetish (take a guess), over ten full pages of SUV advertisements, crude nicknames for women such as "stinky" to list a few enticements for a potential reader. Would you allow your girl friend, wife, mother or sister to be referred to as "stinky-anybody?" in public no less? Rodale et. al., hawks their wares in such an unsavory fashion.

Review: I have issues of this magazine that are collector's items. It's been a fixture in my home(s) for over two decades. But we are finished. I guess I'll miss my ritual of shaking the mag to get all the paper out. Rodale press, a supporter of the ecology movement must knowingly zap a small forest just for thrill of sending me a handful of notices to win and save and subscribe. One reminder is more than sufficient.

There was a time this magazine contained actual news. Seen an exclusive on a product failure or recall lately? This magazine hears and sees no evil. Consumer 'goes elsewhere' if you want to be protected. The mag solicits input; yet email submitted to the input section on the web site, comes back no such address. E-mail the editor, and go to sleep. You won't hear a thing. This is not a pro-consumer outfit.

And spare me the next rehash of the poor village idiot who rides the department store bicycle around the moon, the same kind of cheap bike the editors of the magazine abhor.
Occasionally they hit their best pace when a noted journalist writes an article. Most times, what was written could have been put in half the space. The dog chow-down time rating in a fitness bar article for example would have been more worthwhile if a few humans rated the taste. The slide of "Bicycling" from cycling substance to cycling pap is most lamentable.