Editor's note: Cook Neilson, a former editor at Cycle, takes this opportunity to respond to Soup's story on the demise of Cycle, published last week.

Nice piece about Cycle, and thanks. I don't know exactly why what happened, happened. Things I do know: CPM (cost per thousand, a publishing term having to do with how much it cost advertisers to reach a thousand customers) had something to do with it, although with Cycle's substantial circulation lead over CW and the rest I would have thought our CPM would have been competitive; there might have been a problem with small advertisers for whom CPM wasn't as important as simply how much a third of a page cost; finally, it may have been time, simply enough, for us to go. Cycle after all had a pretty long run; Clymer bought it from Pete Petersen back in the late Forties or early Fifties, sold it to Ziff-Davis around 1966 for exactly 330,000 times what it cost him, ZD sold it to CBS for multiple millions of dollars, and I don't know what it was worth when CBS unloaded it to Hachette (but I'll bet it was a tidy sum). All-told we hung in there for almost a half-century.

One last thing I know for sure: from the ZD years all the way to our demise, Cycle only had three Editors: Gordon Jennings, me, and Phil Schilling. Of the three of us, Phil was by far the best, overseeing Cycle during its most difficult (and competitive) years. My hat's off to him, and to all the extraordinary staffers Gordon and Phil and I were lucky enough to work with over the years.

It was fun while it lasted; it could have lasted a bit longer.

Thanks again for thinking of all of us.