It’s funny when you look back at certain moments in your life and see how choosing just one road over another can completely change how your adventure develops. Today, we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the launch of eKartingNews.com, the website that I bought from its creators in 2004 to add to my portfolio of motorsports publications. The phone call with the opportunity to purchase EKN came as a surprise to me, but it certainly was a blessing. I thought it might be fun to take this time to look back on how much of the early days unfolded.

It may have been two and a half decades ago, but I can still remember meeting EKN founder Glenn Holland in the scoring tower at the Oklahoma Motorsports Complex in 2000 while I was announcing for Superkarts! USA and their ProMoto Tour. Glenn was in from California, and he and his partners had just started a new website called eKartingNews.com. Little did I know how important his new project would be to my future in the sport.

I was publishing Shifter Kart Illustrated magazine in those days, the publication I’d launched in late 1998 to focus solely on the emerging gearbox category. Not surprisingly, SKUSA founder Don Janowski and CEO Jim Murley were big supporters of my idea and we built a symbiotic bond that has stood the test of time through new ownership and close to three decades of working together. As was my intent from the magazine’s launch at the 1998 SuperNationals, SKI reset the bar for karting publications at the time; full color cover-to-cover, with a focus on covering races and putting the stars of the sport – the drivers and the machinery – in the spotlight. I wanted to give karting our version of RACER and RacerX magazines – and I felt I accomplished my mission. However, along this time came the World Wide Web, and information delivery began to evolve quickly. EKN was certainly at the front of this movement. Magazines were still incredibly popular, but it was easy to see that the internet was going to change everything.

Glenn and his partners at EKN moved quickly to establish the immediate delivery of news, and the site gained a following rapidly, helped along by the valuable addition of their discussion forums, which essentially took over for Pete Muller’s ‘Karting Mailing List’. If you haven’t been in the sport for more than 25 years, you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about, but that’s OK. The email mailing list was the genesis of instant group communication within our sport. EKN’s discussion forum quickly developed into the hub for online chatter, focused on all sort of topics, from tech questions and event information to classifieds and ‘General Discussion’, which wasn’t always friendly.  The bottom line was that EKN quickly built into the ‘hub of karting on the internet’.

We dabbled with websites in the early 2000s for my magazines – I was publishing three at that time – but the focus was more on simply providing a website so people could subscribe and order back issues. We’d eventually play with evening updates from the hotel during some race weekends, but our site wasn’t designed for easy posting, so it was an arduous task to post anything. It was the early 2000s, and websites were so new and dial-up internet was painfully slow. ‘Drag and drop’ website design software was available, but not great. I knew we wouldn’t be building a site to rival EKN anytime in the near future. I had to focus on our core, which were the magazines.

The challenging business side of motorsports media is what played to my advantage. One of the hurdles in running any type of motorsports magazine or website is the cost of traveling to events. Advertising revenue needs to outpace expenses, and that’s not always easy. Advertising partners are the lifeblood of a publication, as it still is for EKN these days. In those early days with the Shifter Kart Illustrated, I had SKUSA on my side and they covered my expenses to have me trackside to call the races and work with Jim Murley. I’d arrive early to help set-up and leave on Tuesday morning after helping Jim tear down the tent and pack the trailer on Monday. With my travel costs covered, I was able to make a little money on the magazine those days, all through advertising revenue, as I lost money on every subscription and even more during the handful of years I paid to put SKI on the newsstands. That’s another story all on its own.

I don’t know the particulars of EKN’s financial status at that time, but I’m sure they were battling that same hurdles that I was, as they were trackside at pretty much every race I was, and more in Southern California where they were based. Eventually, their editor left to start his own publication, and two remaining partners decided to make a move. During the summer of 2004, Glenn Holland reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in buying eKartingNews.com. I was thrilled and we quickly made a deal that changed my future. Having been envious of the site’s immediate news delivery capabilities and knowing the cost to build a site of EKN’s complexity in those days, it was a no-brainer for me. My company already had the sales, accounting, and editorial staff to support the addition of the site to our line-up, and I only needed to hire a full-time Managing Editor.

Enter David Cole.

The purchase of the site went well and I still count Glenn Holland as a friend to this day. We rarely communicate as he’s gone on to a successful business career, but when we connect, it’s with great respect. I know that I respect the way he approached selling his site to his primary competition at the time, and he’s told me that he has admiration for how we’ve stayed true to the mission of the website and the way I’ve run the business.

Once all the contracts were signed and EKN joined the fold, my company had an online platform to deliver news on a daily basis. After acting as a Road Racing Correspondent for SKI for a couple years, David Cole signed on as my Managing Editor at the tender age of 25 and to learn on the job. That year’s Rock Island Grand Prix was his first official event with us. During those early years, I was also producing two other publications – Speedway USA (dirt karting) and FormulaCar Magazine – and with a staff of just four or five people at any time, I didn’t get much sleep and worked more than a few all-nighters to get issues to the printer. EKN took off immediately as it paired so well with what we were doing, and David hit the ground running, so it wasn’t much of an additional burden. A sign of things to come.

That year’s SKUSA SuperNationals at Sam Boyd Stadium was our first race to full leverage EKN as a daily trackside coverage platform, and the success of that weekend forever altered the history of my company. One by one, I ended the publication of my magazines in favor of EKN and, eventually, its sister site eFormulaCarNews.com. I continued to publish what had become Super Kart Illustrated for two more years before deciding to produce the last issue in December of 2006. It was time to go fully digital.

Over the next two decades, EKN has been a constantly evolving platform. Daily news and regular trackside coverage of the sport’s biggest events has been the core of our program, and we added recorded trackside audio shows – our ‘Happy Hour with Howden’ shows – in the mid-2000s. There were no podcasts back then. We tried to push the envelope and add new components to EKN’s line-up. Our audio efforts led us to stream my live commentary at races once the technology became accessible, and that was ground-breaking for the sport and allowed families to listen in from home. I think we had over 10,000 people listening to our stream of the 2009 SKUSA SuperNationals the year that Michael Schumacher competed in the event. The advent of podcasts brought with it the EKN Radio Network. Things developed quickly. The COVID shutdown pushed us to play with live broadcasts on YouTube, and they’ve become a core component of our editorial platform this decade. With technology growing exponentially, there’s no telling what the next 10 years will look like. But we can certainly look back at the last 20 for us, and 25 since EKN’s launch, to see how far we’ve come.

Let me wrap this column with a ‘thank you’ to my right hand man David Cole, as he’s been a driving force and quarterback with all of this evolution. His job description has certainly changed over the last two decades as he’s grown along with the site, and he’s always been open to trying something as we work to stay current with the trends and technology. EKN would not be near what it is today without David’s unparalleled work ethic and dedication to its success.

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