Gone in 14 seconds
The new TRI mag from H3 Publications was announced to be coming in late April, the publisher made some brash statements and soon after he held up the white flag before the anticipated triathlon magazine battle had even started. What happened?
"We gave a lot of thought and did a lot of research and no matter who we talked to it seemed everyone was about to sign up for a triathlon," said House to Slowtwitch on January 11th. 30,000 copies of issue # 1 were supposed to hit the newsstands in late April, plus another 30,000 copies were announced to be going to various events and promotions. But what a difference 5 weeks can make.
"I pulled the plug," said Dave House the publisher of H3 Publications to Bicycle Retailer 3 days ago. "It just got way too political." Slowtwitch contacted House via email and phone to get more details about this development and understand what he meant with it getting "too political." During the brief moment we reached the man on his cell phone today we were promised a response an hour later. But four hours later still nothing from H3 Publications. We actually made multiple attempts to reach House, but no update came to us nor were we able to get a hold of the man. House’s cell and office phone mailboxes are actually full, so messages couldn’t be left, and several emails which were sent were not answered. Glad we are not a potential advertiser, but we did feel a bit like stalkers.
Along those lines the last week several rumors were going around about Jay Prasuhn and John Segesta being reunited with their old Triathlete Magazine boss John Duke at World Triathlon Corporation versus working on the first issue of TRI magazine as we had previously reported. But neither Prasuhn nor Segesta was available for comment. However over the last few days several Prasuhn stories were featured on the Ironman.com website so it appears that at least Prasuhn moved that direction.
With no editor to run the new magazine that would certainly have dealt House a bad deck to get started with TRI, but what came first? Did House pull the plug and that made Prasuhn move, or did Prasuhn move and House then pulled the plug? But if the latter was the case, what about a plan B?
Ed: The above featured cover is a mock cover
