What happened to the daily round-up
The morning digest did three jobs at once. Each of them found a new home, and one of them got lost on the way.
For a good part of the 2010s, a lot of ultrarunners took their news the same way every weekday morning: a single page of links, results and opinions, written fast, read with coffee. A round-up from 9 December 2015 shows the form at its height. Gordy Ainsleigh had missed his qualifier for Western States. Doug Tompkins, who founded The North Face, had died after a kayak accident on a lake in Chile. The doping argument was going round again. Further down, between a holiday gift list and a desert stage race, sat a short item about an editor leaving Running Times and a remark that print magazines were closing across the sector.
The remark was more current than it looked. Five days earlier, on 4 December, Rodale had announced that Running Times would close after its January to February 2016 issue, with subscribers moved over to Runner’s World. Running Times had a circulation of about 123,000 against 671,000 for its sister title. It was the magazine for runners who raced to win, and Rodale kept the bigger one.
The print shelf
Trail running’s own titles held on longer. Trail Runner, published from Carbondale, Colorado, had been in print since 1999 when its owner Outside said in May 2022 that it would end print for about 80 percent of its brands and magazines and move readers to an online subscription. The title carried on as a website. The magazine that arrived every couple of months, with gear tests and a long feature to keep on the shelf, did not.
The money explains most of it. A daily blog cost one person’s mornings. A print title cost paper, postage and staff, and it could not report a race result for weeks. Once a phone could do the latter in seconds, the bimonthly schedule became the weak point instead of the strength.
Results went live
The daily round-up’s first job was to say who won and how. That job has moved to the race itself. Western States began a live broadcast in 2021, produced with a Southern California studio; before that its audience followed the race through reports on Ultralive.net. Starlink arrived on the course in 2022 and let the crew go live from sections that had been out of reach. Hardrock follows its field with GPS tracking, and live trackers and split pages are now normal at the big hundreds.
A morning digest cannot compete with that, and it no longer needs to. By breakfast the people who cared had watched the finish, and the people who did not would not have read the result anyway.
Links went to the feed
The second job was collection: finding the race report, the interview, the odd story from Brazil, and putting them in one place. Social feeds took that over with no effort from anyone. They are faster and far larger. They are also unordered, and they repeat whatever is already being shared, so the small blog post that a round-up would have found in a corner is now harder to come across than it was in 2012.
Opinion went to audio
The third job was the line of commentary under each link, and that was usually the point of reading. It has gone mostly to podcasts and video, where a host can spend an hour on what a round-up gave two sentences. Long interviews with race directors, coaches and the front of the field are now easy to find. Dylan Bowman, who hosts the Freetrail podcast, has been one of the two lead voices of the Western States broadcast.
What did not move
The thing the old format did best was choosing. Twenty items picked from a hundred, in an order, each with a verdict, from someone whose taste a reader had learned. A feed does not choose. A broadcast covers one race. A podcast follows one conversation for an hour.
The nearest heirs are email newsletters that arrive on a set morning with a dozen links and a paragraph on each. They work on the same bet the morning round-up made: that a reader with ten minutes would rather have someone else do the sifting.