Wikipedia reports that:

“Bicycling started in 1961 as Northern California Cycling Association Newsletter, a 4 page mimeographed newsletter (8 ½ x 14) started by Peter Hoffman. ... The name was changed to American Cycling Newsletter with Vol. 3 No. 1 in March, 1964 issue. The name was changed again with Vol. 5 No. 1 in March, 1965 to American Cycling. ... (Finally the) name was changed to Bicycling! with the Dec 1968 Issue Vol 7 No 9. ... In early December 1977, a team was sent from Rodale to California to meet with the owner and iron out a deal. Rodale acquired Bicycling! and published their first issue in February, 1978.”

If you cycled in the UK in the late 1970s or early 1980s you read a cycling press that reported on technical developments of any kind by regurgitating badly translated press releases provided by importers who seemed to barely understand, or even care about, what they were importing. In this grim, grey, world a copy of Bicycling was like manna from heaven. It was in colour (imagine!), it contained informative adverts that sought to engage the interest of thinking people, and, most of all, it contained literate, critical, original articles.

Finally, as the icing on the cake, it employed Frank Berto and gave space to his long and authoritative articles on derailleur gearing. It was like Scientific American but without the endless, unintelligible articles about string theory.

We used to wait for each new edition with bated breath.