This comment was posted on Revzilla’s Common Tread blog. It was made with tongue-in-cheek of course, but the underlying truth is serious. Digital=Ephemeral
I’ve been anticipating the end of Cycle World as a print magazine for a decade now. As a freelancer, I had a checkered relationship with them anyway. Getting paid was a chronic problem.
CW had some authoritative staffers and contributors during the years I dealt with it. Don Canet was a terrific test rider; Peter Egan was too good for any motorcycle magazine, and Kevin Cameron still provided an occasional deep insight. But at the top, editors and publishers were not just experienced but also hidebound.
Years ago, after one of the serial upheavals there, new owners replaced the publisher. As it happened, I came to know the new publisher’s identity before it was public. I remember telling another insider who it was going to be and she immediately spat, “That’s it. They’re screwed. They had an opportunity to change things, but decided to stick with same bunch of losers.”
Proximate cause of death? Disruption in publishing generally; a weak motorcycle market; Covid… take your pick. As I wrote back in 2011, I still think there’s a role for a motorcycle magazine of record—a real one, in print. Others disagree. But there’s another reason I’ll miss Cycle World even though I didn’t really like it.
The end of permanence
Lance reported on the end of Cycle World on Revzilla’s Common Tread blog, and one of the comments really jolted me.
“I'm gonna have to buy a lot of iPads to keep my garage walls covered with motorcycle pics.”
It was tongue-in-cheek, but got to a much deeper truth. People always warn you to be discreet online, because “the Internet is permanent”. But it really isn’t. I wrote hundreds of Backmarker columns for the old RoadRacerX.com site, but when Racer X pulled the plug on that magazine, the website wasn’t even archived.
A tiny fraction of what I wrote is preserved on the Wayback Machine archive, but many of those early Backmarkers are lost forever. Hard drives have crashed, old computers have been rendered obsolete and thrown out, and backup drives have been lost in moves. Sometimes, I can extract old copy from archived emails, but back then I used a Yahoo email address and they’re not reliable any further back than about 2008.
After RoadRacerX.com was summarily killed (it was profitable, by the way, just not profitable enough) Bart Madson, who was editing Motorcycle-USA.com, invited me to move Backmarker to that site. I posted hundreds of Backmarker columns there, too, before it was killed by new owners. At least they left the site up—presumably because it had some advertising value. But the last time I looked for an old column there, I could not find the site at all.
By contrast, in the early 2000s I wrote about a hundred Classic America columns for the UK magazine Classic Bike. At the time, the magazine had a laughably rudimentary website—basically it was just a link to a subscription service. My column never appeared online, but because Classic Bike is the kind of magazine that almost every subscriber hangs on to, my columns will remain readable as long as there are people to read ‘em. My point is that once a story is physically printed in a mass-circulation magazine, it will always be available. You might not be able to retrieve it in seconds, but if you’re willing to search for it, you’ll be able to find it.
When I researched my story about the British Army team’s escape from the 1939 ISDT, I got a special library card and went to the British Library’s newspaper and magazine archive in north London, where they happily provided any physical magazine that I wanted. At that time, they were at least 60 years old. I can fucking promise you that no motorcycle web site will still be online in 2080.
It’s not just the Internet that’s proven impermanent. It’s digital formats generally
When I left the Isle of Man in 2002, I had hundreds of rolls of 35mm film—B&W and color—stored in binders. I didn’t really know where I was going from there, and the last thing I needed was a suitcase full of photos, so I asked around amongst photographers, to determine how I could have them scanned and archived.
The consensus was that the best choice was to send them in to be scanned to Kodak Photo CDs. I spent hundreds of dollars scanning hundreds of select images, and once I had the discs in hand, culled almost all the original negs and trannies.
You can already guess where this is going, I bet. Now, almost 20 years on, there’s simply no way to extract and display those files. No common image handling software can read them. The only IoM images I can now use are the ones that I happened to open with Kodak’s proprietary software (when it was supported) and saved as .jpg files.
So don’t give me this ‘the Internet is permanent’ BS
I’ll tell you what’s permanent. Print. Physical media. Yes, you can burn a newspaper, but you’ll never burn every copy of a newspaper. And yes, paper’s biodegradable but if you just take a stack of newspapers and bury them, they’ll still be legible when they’re unearthed in a century. Stained, mildewed, water-damaged, but ultimately readable. We’re still reading paper documents from ancient Egypt, for fuck’s sake.
So that’s unlike my old Backmarker columns. And photos taken in the Civil War are still usable, unlike the ones I trusted to Kodak Photo CDs less than 20 years ago.
Speaking of permanence, the best of my (surviving) Backmarker columns can be yours forever, for just $22, if you buy a copy of On Motorcycles: The Best of Backmarker. Click the pic to jump straight to Amazon. And thanks for reading.