For those of you who haven’t yet heard, our December 2019 magazine was the final print issue of Trucks, Parts, Service.
Before I go any further, I must immediately note, TPS is not going away. Not by a longshot. This website remains the preeminent source for news about the medium- and heavy-duty independent aftermarket and dealer channels.
Our focus on your industry and your businesses has been our priority for more than 50 years and that’s not changing a bit. TPS has grown up in the aftermarket and Successful Dealer — which debuted in 1982 and was brought under the TPS umbrella in May — has done the same in the dealer community.
We cherish our position in this industry and are proud to call you our readers. Every interview we conduct, every story we write, every decision we make, is made with you in mind. We want to inform you. We want to educate you. We want to be a partner you can rely on.
But times change, as does business, and as we near the close of the new millennium’s second decade, it is time for TPS to evolve in a manner that will enable us to best educate and inform you tomorrow and into the decades to come.
We believe we can do that best here.
A digital-exclusive publication has key advantages over a print product. The most evident is the timeliness in which we can deliver you news. Those of you who are subscribers to our daily and weekly TPS newsletters or frequent our website already know this. TPS has covered the current events of the aftermarket in its pages since 1966, but we’ve never been able to bring those events to you immediately in the pages of this magazine like we can on our website.
Take next month’s Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week (HDAW) as an example. Print production schedules have forced us in recent years to recap HDAW in our March issue. That’s more than a month after the event concludes and, after printing and shipping, has meant those of you who haven’t been able to attend HDAW have been forced to wait at least six weeks after the event concluded to find out what happened there. Here, we can give you a recap of the important news and events that occur in Dallas in 24 hours or less.
Shifting to digital also frees up the hours each month we’ve previously dedicated to magazine development to researching and reporting the news. As an online-exclusive publication, TPS will publish more stories. We’ll be able to spend more time diving into industry trends, covering important equipment and product announcements in greater detail and grabbing headlines from other corners of trucking to evaluate how they’ll impact your business in real time. Some of that we’ve never done before; some of it we’ve done only sparingly when time allowed. Now we can do both without hesitation.
This transition is bittersweet for us because we know TPS has loyal readers who prefer this printed magazine as their method of delivery for aftermarket and dealer news. I recognize changing what we do is changing what you do and you didn’t ask for a change. So, I must ask you to be open to something different. Something new.
There was once a time not long ago when you didn’t use the Internet at all. Now you’re using it every day. All we’re asking of you is to continue using it for this. I can assure you it will be worth it.
