Oz Warren

I've finally decided that I won't be buying any more copies of Motorcycle News (MCN). I've been a regular reader since the mid nineties (when I came back to biking in a serious way) and have always tolerated their sensationalist approach to journalism and their occasional descent into lunacy in order to get at the genuinely interesting content. So why now?

A number of things have influenced me, some small and some less so:

1. Most of the information published in MCN is available on the web and various RSS feeds much sooner and for free. Sports coverage is always half a week behind the times and I've increasingly found myself feeling that I'm reading old news.
2. The proportion of advertising has increased to the level where it's a pain to flick through parts of the paper trying to find actual content to read. Some of the sites and RSS feeds that provide my alternative sources have banner and other ads, but they're actually less intrusive in most cases.
3. The once separate bike sales section is now integrated into the main paper and you can understand why they've done that. People like me who didn't want to buy a bike would just take the separate section out and MCN obviously need to show their advertisers that they can expose people to paid adverts. It's now more rubbish that I have to thumb through, trying to find the content that I've paid for.

So goodbye MCN. I hope you have a few more years of life in you before your outdated business model crashes up against the reality of tech-savvy readers with their iPad newsreader apps. Maybe you'll get round to turning your website into something more usable at some point. Opening the MCN home page at the moment gives me a feeling of "whatheheelisgoingonhereitsallsobusyanditsnotclearwhatIshouldbelookingat".