The future of news coverage on CyclingTips
Dear CyclingTips readers,
The way we cover news from the cycling world is constantly evolving, because the way our audience accesses information is always evolving. With that in mind, we have a relatively large evolution to announce.
After more than 1,700 editions, the CyclingTips Daily News Digest, our daily news roundup, will soon be heading to your inbox as a newsletter. And for those who prefer to avoid their inbox, we are also launching a daily news podcast called News Cycle that will allow you to get your news in audio form. We quietly rolled the podcast out this week, and I’m already a big fan.
As we move our daily news roundups to email and podcast formats, you’ll also notice an increase in in-depth news stories on CyclingTips.com.
With those changes in the works, we’d like to take a moment to provide a bit more context. The past, present, and future of CyclingTips’ news operation are explained below.
As always, we welcome your feedback. Thanks for making CyclingTips part of your routine.
Caley Fretz
CT Editor-in-Chief
The Daily News Digest has been at the heart of CyclingTips’s coverage of the cycling world for more than six years, starting in 2013 as the Rocacorba Daily. When CyclingTips founder Wade Wallace interviewed Matt de Neef for the role of editor, he asked Matt what he wanted to see as a reader of the website. A daily post bringing together all of the big news and race results into one convenient place was not necessarily a brand new idea, but Matt felt it was lacking from the world of online cycling media.
The first edition of the Rocacorba Daily, named for one of Spain’s most iconic cycling climbs, was published in February of 2013. The idea was to pull in news and results from around the world of cycling, linking back to original sources in both English-language media and otherwise. The digest format would allow readers to catch up on what happened overnight at the time, the CyclingTips audience was composed of almost all Australian readers, and the Rocacorba Daily came out before 9am Melbourne time.
Matt wrote the Rocacorba Daily every day for the first few years. As it has grown it has become more of a team effort. Shane Stokes did the lions share of the work for a long time, the CyclingTips staff has split the work at points, and Dane Cash has been handling it since February of this year.
We changed the name to the Daily News Digest in January of 2015, concerned that people were missing out because they might have been unfamiliar with the name “Rocacorba” and stayed away as a result. It was shortened in May of 2018 to make it more readable and more skimmable (in other words, more digestible) and also more lighthearted.
Now, the DND is evolving again. Starting soon, the Daily News Digest will land in your inbox as a daily email newsletter instead of on CyclingTips.com. Alongside the newsletter, the News Cycle podcast will allow you to listen to a short rundown of the day’s news wherever you are.
You can subscribe to the News Cycle podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The newsletter and podcast are part of a bigger change to the way we cover news the way our audience accesses information evolves, so our news operations are evolving too.
The shift in the format of our digest content will coincide with an increase in news coverage on the website, led by our News Editor, Dane. That setup will allow us to give big stories the coverage they deserve.
In other words, you’ll have multiple ways to get caught up on the latest news quickly and easily, but we’ll be able to provide context to more news items that might have only received a few lines of coverage in the DND.
Thanks for following the Daily News Digest for all of these years (and the Rocacorba Daily if youve been here that long!). We’re proud of how many of you use the DND, and CyclingTips as a whole, as a one-stop-shop for news and context from the cycling world.
You can sign up here to stay connected with the Daily News Digest as it changes format.
Meanwhile, stay tuned to CyclingTips.com as we bring you more in-depth coverage of the news. We hope youll continue on with us as we evolve.
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