29ers in the Wall Street Journal

November 13th, 2006 by Tim Grahl

Last week I was contacted by a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wanting to know more about the 29er trend for an article he was writing. We ended up chatting for about a half hour and I gave a rundown of the history, growth and benefits of riding on bigger wheels.

From the sounds of things the article was supposed to be pretty long. Instead it was way scaled down and published on Saturday as a 200 word article. It basically said 29ers are a new niche in mountain biking created as “a new remedy for slumping sales” (WTF? I definitely didn’t say that), gave a couple facts on the bigger wheels and then ended with short summaries on the Orbea Alma and Gary Fisher Caliber. Not extremely impressive, but still good to see mainstream coverage.

Also, apparently due to the length of the article, I wasn’t listed as a source even though some of the benefits of 29ers were listed in the article and the reporter didn’t know those before talking to me.

If you happen to subscribe to WSJ.com, click on this link to read the article.

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4 Responses to “29ers in the Wall Street Journal”

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1 Sevo on Nov 13th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

Yep that’s the media for you! I’ve been written up a lot for my website, DriveRightPassLeft.com, and rarely does it seem like my words match up. Just part of dealing with the media I guess. Cool to see the WSJ took an intrest, sad to see the article was so short.
2 GCG199 on Nov 13th, 2006 at 5:27 pm

Tim, don’t be shocked by this. The same thing happened just a couple months ago. They did a hit piece article on the cutlery industry in America. The article was terrible But when the reporter that wrote the article was calling up knife companies for research, he made it sound like it was going to be a good article.

Down with the mainstream media! That is exactly what the Internet is supposed get around.
3 Cloxxki on Nov 14th, 2006 at 1:48 pm

Perhaps it would be interesting to know who the reporter called AFTER you.
He can’t base an article of any length on input from one source now, can he?
4 Robb Sutton on Mar 26th, 2008 at 10:12 am

Gotta love the media….

Slumping sales?! I don’t think that is true…I would love to see where they pull their stats from…