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Alan Kidd Without Total Off Road magazine, 4x4 would not still exist
Alan Kidd Editor
Forgive me, but I’m going to have to be a little self-indulgent this month. We’ve had quite a few anniversaries this year, but when I read about it being 20 years since the launch of the fi rst Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, I realised that a similar amount of time had passed since something else came to pass in the off-road world that has pretty much defi ned my career ever since.
The story goes back about fi ve years more than that, to when myself and a colleague dreamt up a couple of ideas for new magazine launches. We already knew better than to take them to our existing publisher (my mate had tried that once before and regretted it), so I got in touch with one of the company’s competitors and we ended up in a clandestine meeting with a couple of their directors.
It all sounds tremendously cloak and dagger, and I suppose in a manner of speaking it was. But we pitched our ideas, they looked uncomfortable because one of them was a magazine they were already working on, and then one of them said the fateful words: ‘To be honest, I was hoping you were going to come up with a really good idea for a new off-road magazine.’
At the time, 4x4 was known as Off Road and 4 Wheel Drive, and it wasn’t doing very well. It had a competitor called International Off Roader that seemed to be doing even worse and there was a strong feeling that this corner of the magazine market was there for the taking. Which, presumably, is what matey was thinking about.
In the car on the way home, our moods were quite muted. The guys hadn’t jumped at any of our ideas (though one of them was later to become a massive success for another publisher, with my mate at the heart of it) and it felt like our escape plot from a company we’d lost all respect for had been foiled.
But that comment kept going round in my head. ‘A really good idea for a new offroad magazine…’
By the time we got home, I had a format all worked out. It would be along the same lines as American magazines like Petersen’s and Four-Wheeler, and it would be called Total Off Road.
For 10 years, we had a ball putting Total Off
Road together I won’t go into the reasons why it took another half a decade before TOR fi nally came to light, and I certainly won’t say anything about the reasons why it never really did get to be like Petersen’s and FourWheeler. But for the next ten years, we had an absolute ball putting it together. Ironically, during that fi ve-year period there were major management changes at my old employer and Off Road and 4 Wheel Drive was relaunched as 4x4, with the sort of resources I could only have dreamt of when I was there. As a result, TOR never did knock it off its perch at the top of the market, but we got ourselves a reputation for championing the cause of everyday realworld off-roaders. In the process, we covered some pretty mental vehicles and met some pretty mental people. I got to do some pretty mental stuff and though there were a couple of times when I got too close for comfort, I managed to avoid any of the monster stacks my colleagues used to warn me I had coming if I didn’t calm down. Fast forward to four years ago. TOR was now being published by Assignment Media and 4x4 was still the market leader, when we decided to go for an audacious swoop and buy it. To my amazement, the deal happened and we had control of the entire all-marques off-road market in the UK. Our strategy was to amalgamate the two publications, keeping the best bits of both of them. We would also keep the 4x4 title, because it was the one with more readers. It worked like a charm, and here I am now telling you this story about how I created Total Off Road and years later, we rolled it into the magazine you’re holding in your hands right now. And this is a poignant issue, too – because September 2002 was the date on the cover of the fi rst ever TOR. We’ve celebrated the milestone this month with a few retro features from that launch issue. Making magazines is a bit more of a serious business these days, and we spend less time messing about and having a laugh, but they were good times – and they yielded some great articles.
4x4
Tel: 01283 553243 Email: enquiries@assignment-media.co.uk Web: www.totaloffroad.co.uk www.4x4i.com Online Shop: www.toronline.co.uk Facebook: www.facebook.com/totaloffroad www.facebook.com/4x4Mag
Editor
Alan Kidd
Art Editor
Samantha D’Souza
Contributors
Olly Sack, Gary Noskill, Dan Fenn, Paul Looe, Tom Alderney
Photographers
Harry Hamm, Steve Taylor, Richard Hair, Vic Peel, Phil Masters, Shelagh Ballard
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Advertising Manager
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Advertising Production
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Publisher and Head of Marketing
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