It’s a credit to you, our readers, that the devotion to AMCN has remained so strong
A few days ago, I spoke with a dedicated reader named Peter, who’s been reading AMCN cover-to-cover since the mid-60s. “While I was in the army, my mother would bubble it up and post it to me,” he told me. “Then I started buying it myself. I’d read the road tests, the rally reports, Michael Scott, all the other columnists, every single page. Took me about a week each time.”
Peter is now 76. Misses Gassit terribly. Rides most days. Every year, he and a bunch of mates do the WA-SA border run, have a few drinks, some pub meals. “I hope I’m still riding another 20 years from now. It’s the greatest stress reliever there is.”
Times have changed though. Or in this case, timings have. When Peter popped into his local newsagent like clockwork to pick up his latest issue on a recent Thursday, it wasn’t there. Often there are delays in deliveries nowadays, so the guy told him to try again on Tuesday. Still nothing.
This is where mundane factors like sky-rocketing costs, those delivery hassles and the simply brutal print schedule come into play. Send pages to printers on Monday, lodge mag with distributors on Tuesday, get it into mailboxes and outlets around the country by Thursday. In reality, though, even the best efforts were getting it there by the following Monday – okay, Wednesday – an entire week after the onsale date. With the urgency required to publish race reports and still maintain some form of relevance, this is pretty unacceptable. Add to that the costs of paper and Aus Post deliveries also going through the roof and it became clear something had to change.
Sadly, so many amazing magazines have died over the last five to 10 years. It’s a credit to you, then, that the devotion to AMCN has remained so strong. We are doing everything within our power to see that the mag continues to thrive – and if that means going to three weeks rather than two, then that is a decision we would make every time. In fact, our distributors actually suggested going to the four-week format more common to lifestyle mags – but we value our print readers like Peter way too much for that, being core to everything we have ever done, and so we split the difference with three.
“I’ll have to change me calendar now!” Peter responded after I explained the reasons behind the change. “Every yellow bin day I’d pop down to the newsagent – lovely people there, they’d always put aside a copy of AMCN, put my name on it and slip it inside my Daily Tele. Now it’s going to be weird, popping in there every three weeks instead.”
An AMCN subscription is still 25 issues, the cost of which has not changed. You’ll still receive every cracking page of content you ever did; it will simply stretch over 18 months now, rather than 12. Race reports and other insanely time-sensitive features will have more of a presence online, and already we are seeing amazing engagement from vocal readers on our social media channels, some of which you’ll see on our Access pages. So please do come and join the conversation (after donning the requisite full-face carbon fibre helmet and body armour with an airbag installed in order to handle all the differing points of view coming at you).
In other news, our valued contributor The Bear experienced every rider’s worst nightmare at the Aussie launch of the Royal Enfield Bear 650 he attended on your behalf (click here). For a lot of riders, dropping a bike at low speed is in many ways worse than a high-speed crash, because we think these types of crashes are preventable.
The Bear is way too much of a gentleman to go into the details – but even though he has ridden most places in the world worth visiting, it shows that even a professional rider with decades of experience is human, and that a motorcycle only has two wheels, so eventually it will fall over.
Times do change. The Bear’s dedication to motorcycles – and ours – never will.
