Nature Bats Cleanup
Volume 5, Issue 9, October 1998
There was a tiny little line of print in the ISSN boilerplate of this issue - the tiny words inserted unobtrusively at the bottom of the Table Of Contents that serve to officially signify what it is, where it’s from, how much it costs, how often it appears, and who to complain to when your issue shows up in your mailbox looking like it got mangled in a harvester - those words were new, and they were: “Bike Magazine (ISSN 1072-4869) is published by Petersen Publishing Co., L.L.C., 6420 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048-5515.”
On the outside, this was The Big East issue, an oversize format that jutted out wider than the other issues of BIKE, was a pain to package, a headache for newsracks, but was also packed with features in homage to the mountain biking east of the continental divide. It looked and felt like the BIKE magazine people had come to know and love (or hate), just a little bit bigger.
Behind the curtain, Surfer Publications had just been bought by Petersen Publishing, which had just prior to that been purchased by a venture capital group that had a war fund to buy up titles, roll them together into a thicker “portfolio” while cutting staff wherever possible in order to create a paper tiger that they could then unload for profit down the line. It was a hamfisted and ugly acquisition, and resulted in huge turmoil behind the scenes. Petersen had its own cycling titles - Mountain Biker and Bicycle Guide - and those would by the end of the year be folded up, the circulation numbers and staff subsumed into BIKE, and BIKE would enter 1999 as some puffed up thing with a very speculative circulation base of around 150,000 (if I recall correctly. The prior ad rate circ figures for BIKE had been an un-audited number somewhere around 60,000).
The October issue had been laid out a couple months prior to this acquisition, so the only thing they could really roll into it to signify the change was the ISSN boilerplate. But by the time this issue hit the streets, Steve Casimiro had been let go as editor with Rob Reed being promoted to the position, and Brent Diamond had been punted as publisher, replaced by Petersen execs Dick LaGue and Joe Kensil. The remaining staff, a compressed oil/water mix of BIKE and Bicycle Guide and Mountain Biker employees, was less than ecstatic.
Fun times! Meanwhile, I was chugging away writing columns and hoping I wasn’t about to get fired… I can’t believe I actually typed the words “I don’t get poison oak” out loud, noting that one day I “might get my comeuppance”. Duh. Idiot.
In the raft of images that Colin Meagher bequeathed to me, there’s a folder titled “Caution Tape”, and it is chock full of images that all in some way shout “STAY BACK”. This was in there, of course.
