Yes, kiddies, today’s lesson is on the three R’s of off-season cycling journalism. First step is Reduce: Check out Cycloblog; maybe four, five posts in the past month? And TDFBlog hasn’t posted since, what, like August? Even Cyclingnews has to cut down from its three-news-posts-a-day peak. Of course, you’ll see no post frequency reduction here. Consider Cyclocosm your pro cycling Stewart’s. Sure, you’d rather go to the grocery store, or the ice-cream shop, or a real gas station, but are they open 24 hours a day? I don’t think so.
Then there’s the second “r”: Reuse. See today’s lead story at Cyclingnews? Look familiar? Now, since I lack the resources to do any “real” reporting, you could argue that all I do is reuse. But if you scroll down in the Eurosport article and you might note the four-day gap between headlines. Clearly, someone was sitting on that story, saving it to fill some upcoming headline gaps. That’s something I try not to do, but, ocassionally, it’s unavodable (scroll down to “Paolini”). But rest assured, the nadir of cycling news resual, the bald-faced wire service rebroadcast, is something you will never find here.
You’ve no doubt guessed by now that third “r” is Recycling. What precisely do I mean by that? Plowing a story unceremoniously into the dirt, and churning it right back up again. Giving me the B-sample date? That’s news? I got that two days ago (despite the posted date, it was still the 7th in the US of A when that update came out). Man, I’ve been trying not to rip on VeloNews lately, but they just keep teeing themselves up by leading with stories like that, then burying gems like Paolini to Liquigas (scroll down – guess there’s only so many times you can smear nutella in a dude’s hair before he leaves your team). I sat on that story because I thought it was a misprint, until I found this. Would it kill VN to toss in a link once in a while, just to, y’know, cite their sources? Actually, since a simple </u> tag appears to give them trouble (scroll to bottom on the “again” link), <a href=”…”> might be beyond them.