✳️Why do we have Trail Running News Deserts?

Hey pals,

Riddle me this - why don’t we have more local trail running news outlets? The US is covered in them. Why not the UK?

That’s what I explore today as well as Nike’s strategic missteps.

Hope you’re all doing fab, and you have a marvellous weekend!

Matt

🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

On paper, UK trail and fell running looks like it should be able to support its own media. It’s established, it’s active, and it has no shortage of stories. Most weekends there are races, results, new records, and the occasional performance that travels across the proverbial pond. There are institutions, too like the Fell Runners Association and Trail Running Association that give the whole thing a semblance shape, even if loosely. And then there are the flagship events everyone recognises, from Ultra Trail Snowdonia to efforts on the Bob Graham Round that still carry a certain weight.

If you were designing a media market from scratch, you’d probably start here. And yet, very few people have managed to make anything sustainable out of covering it. That’s not for lack of trying. Over the past few years, a few blogs, news outlets, YouTube accounts and podcasts have emerged, each attempting, in slightly different ways, to make sense of the same landscape. Some lean into results and reporting, others try to tell broader stories.

But most end up covering more than the UK, settling into something broader than originally intended to capture a more regular audience of trail fans across the world, making it less a UK specific media outlet, more just a trail or ultra running outlet like many others.

When I talk about a truly local media outlet, I’m talking about your local paper/newsletter/website that covers just your local area. The ones that serve a small community knowing size will always be limited, but that seek to serve as well as inform. Most attempts at “local running media” drift, sooner or later, towards volume. More international races, more results, more content. It’s an understandable instinct, if there’s not enough happening locally, publish more of it from somewhere else. When your business model is ad/eyeball based, then creating what feels like an unnecessary restriction on your coverage feels pointless.

Whilst today I’m talking about the UK, this applies to most markets - starting a trail running specific local media outlet outside the US (and maybe France?) is difficult.

One way around this is a different business model, one less centred on eyeballs. Last year Harrier Trail Running, a British equipment and apparel brand founded by Kate Parker, started a weekly newsletter that covered the UK scene as part of their regular e-commerce emails. The posts were written and sourced by Alecsa Stewart, a freelance journalist, who every week would scour race results and write a few paragraphs on the races that had happened, the faces behind the results, and what was coming in the next week.

Despite being branded, the newsletter saw no drop in enthusiasm from reader, with similar open rates and conversion rates as a normal newsletter, according to Kate. Interest from race directors flooded in wanting to get a call out or get coverage. Alecsa recalled in a conversation this week that when she contacted Beth Langley after her win at Skyline Scotland, a relatively small event , Beth was thrilled to hear someone cared and happily relayed her thoughts and feelings on the race.

When the newsletter was in service of Harrier, it didn’t need to be too concerned about volume, just on whether people engaged with it. The newsletter ultimately ended after a few months when Kate evolved her operations to be leaner in size. Despite its short tenure the question of whether something like this could last longer and be a cornerstone of the scene has stuck with me.

I reached out to Alecsa earlier this week to ask what are the challenges to creating something like this and why she thinks no one else has. The first reason, she said, is simply that you run out of things to say. Not entirely, but enough that a weekly rhythm starts to feel forced. Races happen, but they are local and often already understood by the people who care with the results circulating quickly through the network of clubs, group chats, and Facebook pages. It did force Alecsa to look at more niche events and find the storylines there. This then becomes one of the rewards of constraints - it forces writers to look for narratives not commonly told, broadening the horizon of what British trail running is for readers.

Another difficulty was sourcing results. As mentioned, trail and fell running groups have built an support system of pages and group chats where race results are posted and shared, but rarely are they connected and widely disseminated. Sometimes you have to wait for results to be posted on a Facebook page, or a website. Sometimes you’re trying to read between the lines of Instagram stories to guess whether a particular athlete has crossed the line first or second. Most of the time you have to be the one actively following all of these various groups, pages, websites, group chats, Instagram accounts to put all the clues together about what happened in the race. And all of the time this takes hours to complete, making the news sourcing the most time consuming discipline to be in in this sport. It sounds like we’re quite a backwards nation, but when the sport has grown up without a centralised place for news this is what we get used to.

Yet this is what i think is missing. For all the activity, there isn’t really a place that consistently steps back and explains what’s happening across the scene. Not just what happened at a race, or who ran well, but how things are changing: what’s growing, what’s disappearing, what matters and what probably doesn’t. It’s something I’ve said time and time again on Trailmix - journalism or basic research drawn into a cohesive narrative just doesn’t exist, and when it does it either covers the same well worn narratives or doesn’t last long. The fragments of stories about our sport exist, scattered across different corners, but they’re rarely brought together.

To me, this suggests the issue might not be the size of the scene, but the type of coverage being attempted.

If I were to design something to survive in this environment, it would probably look quite different (but very similiar to Trailmix).

Weekly, for a start. One considered piece a week, rather than a constant stream. Distributed directly, most likely as a newsletter, rather than relying on people to seek it out. Maybe a quick 10 minute podcast reeling off the results. Supported by the obligatory Instagram presence. Built on a cost base low enough to remove most of the pressure, something closer to a single freelance spend than a full operation.

Ideally it would be supported in a way that reflects the scene itself: a small number of advertisers who see value in being close to it, and a small number of readers willing to contribute, not because they have to, but because they think it’s worth keeping around.

Even then, It does feel idealistic.

For something like this to work, it has to feel necessary. It has to do more than repeat what’s already available elsewhere. It has to connect things, occasionally challenge them, and say the kinds of things that are usually left unsaid. It has to source news itself, reaching out to relative strangers to ask what they felt at mile 78 of the Tunnel 200. Otherwise, it slips back into the same pattern of useful but ultimately replaceable. That’s the line most attempts at trail running news don’t quite cross.

These principles in this model can work, and should work across various markets. I foresee one day we have that - a network of local media outlets owned by passionate individuals in multiple markets running these businesses sustainably.

A sustainable UK trail and fell running media business isn’t sitting there waiting to be built. The conditions aren’t especially favourable, and the examples so far suggest as much. It would take time, and effort. But my god do I think it should and could exist. Something small and sustainable - that might just hold.

So if you’re a freelance journalist/passionate fan/want to start something in trail - let me know. Let’s see what we can do.

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Alecsa also works for Elite Trail Team, an independent trail racing team akin to what’s in cycling - a collective of athletes supported by a cadre of physios, nutritrionists, and more all to meet their performance needs. They’ve had quite a bit of success with a relatively small team. I’ll likely dig into that a bit more another time.

What Alecsa and I noodled on was something I hadn’t quite thought about - by virtue of not being attached to a shoe or apparel sponsor they can court non-endemic sponsors and look for budgets from companies that traditionally sponsor cycling teams, e.g pharma, banks, media, and tech companies.

One the many barriers to non-endemic sponsors coming into the sport is that there’s not really any real estate that has scale and is not already taken by the endemic brands. Add on top the operational costs of creating their own trail team and you have very little reason to invest beyond a hope that the numbers work out.

With ETT, there’s a model there that works as a blank canvas and easy entrance to a cautious non-endemic brand. That’s something that could have legs.