UK Cycling Publications Bought Out By Media Giants

It seems that the Christmas and New Year time is when a lot of big deals go down in the media. And we’re not talking about Murdock’s purchase of the rest of Sky… we’re talking about the buying and selling of UK cycling media. And there’s a lot to report on.

Was it really just under two years ago that Dirt Magazine ceased printing issues? It was indeed spring 2015 was when Factory Media decided to stop printing all of its many magazines. And now it’s been announced that the whole Factory Media publishing empire is being bought by ‘Square Up Media’ a London based publisher and printer (yay!) of titles like ‘Square Mile’ magazine and ‘Foodism‘ It’ll certainly be interesting to see how the downhillers, snowboarders and BMXers at Factory get on in a company that produces magazines for hedge-fund managers.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Paddington/Bristol Temple Meads train line, it seems that our pals at MBUK, Cycling Plus and BikeRadar, have been sold – along with other big name titles like Top Gear magazine and The Radio Times to the Germans. Specifically a large and respected publisher called Hubert Burda Media. Our pals over at MBR are still owned by Time.inc, though recently they’ve had a move out of London over to Farnborough (probably way better for riding than Croydon was).

So, by our estimation, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of independent (or privately owned) UK mountain bike magazines left in the UK. There’s us here at Singletrack Magazine, Cranked, Shredder (the Scottish ‘zine) and that’s about it. Know of any others?

UPDATE: In the 24 hours since this story has been live, we’ve found out that VeloVision, the UK print magazine for cargo bikes, recumbents and HPVs has also just shut up shop according to industry website, BikeBiz. We’re very sorry to hear that and wish the team there the best for the future.