Rider Magazine
Rider Magazine is an American motorcycle magazine founded in 1974, based in Camarillo, California in this directory, and written for riders who use their motorcycles for travel, recreation and commuting. For more than five decades it has delivered road tests, touring stories, product evaluations and technical features, deliberately favouring everyday functionality over racing and outright performance. Its fiftieth anniversary in 2024 was marked by its sister publication Powersports Business, within the EPG Media group that also publishes powersports trade titles. In a field where several famous American motorcycle magazines closed or left print, Rider's persistence — monthly in print for much of its life and active online at ridermagazine.com — rests on a clear promise made at its founding: serve the touring and street rider first.
Founded in 1974 by Denis Rouse
Rider was founded in 1974 by Denis Rouse, with Bob Mendel as editor, and published two issues in its first year. The anniversary history published by Powersports Business in December 2024 sets that launch in context: motorcycle sales and the touring aftermarket were starting to boom, Honda unveiled the GL1000 Gold Wing that year, the Motorcycle Safety Foundation had been established, Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published, and a national 55-mph speed limit took effect in the United States. Rider entered a culture that was discovering long-distance motorcycling as leisure, not only as transport or sport.
Its founding focus was explicit. Rider concentrated on touring, catered to recreational and commuting riders, and avoided racing and overly technical material. Motorcycle tests emphasised everyday functionality rather than outright performance. That positioning distinguished it from racing-led and performance-led rivals, and it defined the magazine for decades: a publication for people whose motorcycling centred on journeys, comfort, luggage, weather, roads and the practical choice of machine and gear.
Early Years and Growth in the 1970s
By 1976 Rider was publishing six issues a year. The Powersports Business anniversary timeline recalls an April 1976 issue with a special section on motorcycle camping, an interview with fairing pioneer Craig Vetter, and the magazine's first Honda Gold Wing advertisement — a telling combination, because camping, wind protection and the Gold Wing all belonged to the emerging touring world Rider served. A June 1976 issue carried a Salem cigarettes advertisement featuring a then-unknown model named Tom Selleck, and December's cover illustrated a special section on the motorcycle of the future.
Those details capture a young magazine finding its readers as touring equipment professionalised. Purpose-built fairings, luggage, camping gear adapted to motorcycles and large, comfortable touring bikes turned long rides into a planned activity rather than an ordeal, and Rider documented and encouraged that change. Its readers were often owners who modified, maintained and restored their machines as well as riding them, a hands-on audience that the magazine continued to address with technical and product coverage balanced against its travel writing.
Editorial Focus: Tests for Real-World Riding
Rider describes its editorial mission as delivering comprehensive road tests, touring stories, product evaluations, technical features and award-winning editorial to enthusiasts who use motorcycles for travel, recreation and commuting, who enjoy rallies and clubs, and who repair and restore motorcycles. Its team has been presented as award-winning journalists with, collectively, more than 150 years of hands-on experience.
The key word is comprehensive rather than sensational. A touring rider choosing a motorcycle cares about seat comfort over a full day, wind protection, luggage capacity, fuel range, passenger accommodation, reliability and dealer support as much as peak horsepower. Rider's tests built their reputation on weighing those factors, and readers noticed the difference from lifestyle-led competitors. A letter published in the July 2018 issue, for example, thanked the magazine for keeping stats and review-based writing rather than switching to premium lifestyle fluff — informal evidence, but consistent with the brand Rider maintained.
Touring Stories, Road Tales and Clement Salvadori
Travel writing is the magazine's other pillar. Touring stories report routes, destinations and journeys in a form readers can adapt for their own trips, while long-running columns gave the magazine a personal voice. The best known is Clement Salvadori's Road Tales: Salvadori shared stories from the road with Rider readers from 1988 onward, and 101 of those columns were collected in the book 101 Road Tales (The Faces of Motorcycling), illustrated by his longtime friend Gary Brown.
Salvadori's columns focused often on the small things that make the journey memorable — the rhythm of the road, the character of the bike, people met along the way, food, scenery and the rider's own blunders — rather than only on destination. That sensibility expresses Rider's philosophy in literary form: motorcycling at its best is travel, and the value of a trip lies in the travelling. Columns and touring features also built loyalty; readers followed writers for decades, and the back catalogue of routes and tales remained useful long after news had dated.
Motorcycle of the Year and the Kickstarts Era
Rider's best-known institution is its Motorcycle of the Year award. The award was first presented to the 1990 BMW K1, according to Powersports Business reporting, and the magazine has continued to name an annual winner, in recent years narrowing more than a hundred new and updated street-legal motorcycles to a shortlist of finalists — for 2025, 117 motorcycles considered and ten finalists reported. The award gives Rider an annual moment of authority in the wider industry, reported by its sister trade publication and by manufacturers whose machines are chosen.
The magazine's internal history, as recalled in its fiftieth-anniversary timeline, also marks 1991 as a year of change: founder Denis Rouse wrote his final column, the Kickstarts section was launched in April to lift newsstand appeal with splashier covers, and the Honda CB750 Nighthawk won Motorcycle of the Year. Such details show a mature magazine refreshing its presentation while keeping its core tests-and-touring formula, a balance it would have to strike repeatedly as the motorcycle market and media economics changed.
Ownership, EPG Media and Powersports Business
Rider is part of EPG Media & Specialty Information, the parent company of Powersports Business, the trade publication for the powersports industry, which refers to Rider as a sister publication. That stable matters because it connects a consumer title to a company that also serves dealers and manufacturers, runs industry events and publishes related enthusiast brands, including Woman Rider, launched by EPG in 2017 as a website and newsletter edited by Jenny Smith and aimed at educating and empowering women riders.
Within that group, Rider has been the long-established consumer voice for street and touring motorcycling. Powersports Business regularly reports Rider's awards, tests and event involvement — from the Motorcycle of the Year announcements to the Americade Bring It Bike Show, where Rider and American Rider revealed winners in 2024 — giving the magazine an industry-facing presence beyond its own pages. Greg Drevenstedt, a longtime Rider road test editor quoted in earlier group announcements, embodied that bridge between consumer testing and the trade world.
Digital Presence and Reader Community
Ridermagazine.com developed from a companion site into a daily publishing channel carrying first looks, reviews, touring features, gear coverage and news, supplemented by newsletters, video and social media. As early as 2010 the magazine launched Rider Mobile Alerts, sending weekly updates and articles to readers' phones before some content reached the website or print issue, with editor Greg Drevenstedt describing the aim as delivering motorcycling at its best every issue and every day online. The site also hosted reader forums and blogs from staff, contributors and industry insiders.
Digital editions extended the print magazine to tablets and phones, and the website's archive made decades of road tests and touring stories searchable — valuable because an older touring bike remains a realistic purchase, and a route described years earlier can still be ridden. Rider's social and video output in the 2020s, including projects such as a Gold Wing video aimed at younger buyers who dismissed the model as a couch on wheels, shows the magazine translating its traditional subjects for audiences who may never have bought a print issue.
Audience and Market Position
Rider's audience is the experienced street rider: typically an owner, often a tourer, interested in new motorcycles but equally in gear, maintenance, rallies and places to ride. Reference listings describe it as a national consumer magazine, monthly in frequency for much of its history, covering motorcycles of all types with an emphasis on road, touring and street machines. Its readers' loyalty is the product of consistency — the same reader who bought a first touring bike in the 1980s could still find the magazine addressing the same questions in the 2020s, even as the machines gained electronics, rider aids and connectivity.
That position also insulated Rider somewhat when American motorcycle publishing contracted. Titles centred on racing results or on fashionable lifestyle content were exposed to the internet's speed and to changing trends; a magazine whose value lay in considered tests, durable travel features and trusted columnists retained reasons to exist in print and online. Rider's fiftieth birthday coverage in 2024, led by its own group, treated survival itself as the headline achievement, and fairly so.
Fifty Years On: Significance
Rider Magazine's significance lies in having defined and served the American touring rider for half a century. Founded in 1974, the year the Honda Gold Wing appeared, it chronicled the growth of motorcycle touring from an aftermarket improvisation into a central part of the industry, tested the machines that made it possible, mapped journeys for its readers and gave the experience a literature through writers such as Clement Salvadori.
For worldnm.com, Rider stands as an example of a specialist magazine built on a clear, narrow promise kept over a long period: comprehensive tests judged by real-world use, touring stories written to be ridden, and product advice for people who actually travel by motorcycle. From Camarillo and through ridermagazine.com, it continues that work for a new generation discovering that the journey, as its columnists have argued since the 1970s, is the point.
