Four years ago, Robin Thurston, a new owner of Outside, hosted an introductory meeting with the staff of the magazine. Thurston, a tech entrepreneur and a former semi-professional cyclist, Zoomed in from Boulder, where he lives. Much of the staff gathered in the magazine’s offices, in downtown Santa Fe, eager for a glimpse of their new boss.
The feeling in the room was hopeful. Like many media products, the magazine had been struggling. The thick print issues of the nineties, fat with ads for Patagonia and Land Rover, had become notably slimmer. Some employees had been furloughed to cut down on costs, and Outside had developed a reputation for not paying freelancers in a timely manner. But it was still publishing award-winning journalism, and had a solid reputation founded on decades of literary and investigative journalism. Around the industry, investors were buying distressed media companies; as far as new owners went, Thurston seemed like a good fit, the kind of guy who was happy to have a meeting that was also a bike ride—if you could keep up with him. “The guy’s a hammer,” one staffer told me.
Thurston had sold his first company, MapMyFitness, to Under Armour, in 2013. By the time he purchased Outside, he had already raised more than a hundred and fifty million dollars from venture-capital firms, including Sequoia Heritage, to create a digital hub for the outdoors. He had bought roughly a dozen titles—Backpacker, SKI, Climbing, and Yoga Journal among them—under the umbrella of Pocket Outdoor Media. Outside, the largest in circulation and in prestige, could be the centerpiece. Thurston told the staff that he was changing the name of the company from Pocket Outdoor Media to Outside Interactive, Inc. It was an encouraging step, one that felt like a true commitment.
In February, however, Outside, Inc., announced its third round of layoffs in as many years. Nearly the entire Outside editorial team that was in place at the time of the acquisition has now left, transitioned to non-editorial roles, or been laid off. A handful of full-time staffers edit the website; the print magazine, once a monthly but now a quarterly, has just one full-time dedicated editor. In response to the latest layoffs, a group of thirty-six contributing editors, writers, and photographers—including Tim Cahill, E. Jean Carroll, Ian Frazier, Hampton Sides, and Jimmy Chin—signed a letter requesting that their names be removed from the masthead. Some of the signatories had been around for Outside’s seventeen-year run of National Magazine Award nominations (including three consecutive wins for General Excellence), and the publication of stories that became best-selling books, including “The Perfect Storm” and “Into Thin Air,” and movies, including “Blue Crush.” “Your company now seems intent on destroying what Outside once stood for,” the group wrote in an e-mail, on March 10th. (I have written a handful of pieces for Outside’s website, the most recent of which was published in 2019.) “There is this magazine—or there was this magazine—that was a liberating thing, that had a history, and there were all these people who just cared. They really cared so much about it,” Sides told me.
In response, Thurston reiterated the company’s “commitment to meaningful storytelling” amid a “changing media landscape” and “substantial headwinds in the media market that impact advertising, subscription, and e-commerce.” But, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former editors, writers, and executives, most of whom requested anonymity—either because they had signed non-disparagement agreements or they feared retaliation—mismanagement and a number of missteps have made a challenging situation worse. “I think there was a fundamental lack of direction or understanding from the C-suite as to what any of these magazines were, why the audiences cared about them or subscribed, and what it takes to tell a good story,” a former employee told me. (Outside, Inc., disputes a number of characterizations in this article, including the idea that in-depth reporting—which a representative claimed “remains fundamental”—is no longer a priority.)
Outside was founded, in 1977, by Jann Wenner, who brought on collaborators who had worked with him at Rolling Stone, which he had co-founded ten years previously; they hoped to capitalize on the growing interest in outdoor activities and adventure travel. At the time, there were other publications focussed on the outdoors—Field & Stream had a circulation of nearly two million—but they tended to be either technical and insidery or scandalous and tabloidy. David Quammen, a prominent contributor to Outside, recalled Cahill, a founding editor, referring to the latter as “Jaguars rip my flesh” stories. The magazine saw itself as literary but not self-serious; if the stereotypical National Geographic story was a walk through the jungle recounted in hushed, awed tones, its Outside equivalent was a little dustier, wilder, and less reverent. “Outside always had the feeling that it was apart from the Washington and New York journalism community—it’s there in the name. It was always westward-leaning—you know, getting outside, getting away from big cities, living your life, environmentalism and conservation,” Sides said. “There was always a contrarian aspect to it.”
In 1978, Wenner sold the magazine to Larry Burke, a young man from Chicago who had spent a chunk of his twenties vagabonding around Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Burke eventually moved the magazine’s headquarters from Chicago to Santa Fe, where staffers worked out of an adobe-style building with two wood-burning fireplaces and views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The magazine’s remit was broad: writers covered mountaineering and triathletes, rodeo queens and road trips. Outside sent Susan Orlean to Spain to meet with a female matador, and Don Katz to Yorkshire to profile a man who held the world record for keeping a ferret in his pants the longest. Quammen, who wrote Outside’s natural-science column for fifteen years, told me, “I would write an essay about something really kind of fringe, like, What’s the sense of identity of a spoon worm? What are the redeeming merits of a mosquito? You know, various weird shit. And the editors, God bless them, would print the stuff.”
Mark Bryant was Outside’s editor-in-chief in the nineties, years that seem golden mostly in retrospect. “The business was hard, the work was hard, but it was more straightforward,” Bryant told me. “We could focus on the business at hand, putting out a great magazine for readers, and not, you know, content bundling and data aggregation.” Baby boomers were discovering an apparently bottomless appetite for outdoor sports and adventure travel. The magazine benefitted from this surge in interest, even as some writers expressed misgivings about it. The article that became “Into Thin Air” was an example of this ambivalence. Bryant assigned Jon Krakauer to cover the rapid commercialization of Mt. Everest expeditions, sending him on a trip led by a guide who had agreed to accept the bulk of his fee in the form of future advertising in the magazine. That guide, Rob Hall, ended up dying on the mountain, along with seven other people. Krakauer, traumatized and exhausted, wrote a seventeen-thousand-word article within weeks. The story was memorably clear on the dangers that accompanied the increasing numbers of amateurs on Mt. Everest; the next year, demand for guided trips was higher than ever.
Burke, the owner, was often a source of friction. According to former staffers, he was critical of hippies, dirtbag climbers, environmentalists, and stories about animals. But he was also immensely proud of the magazine. During the nineties, the famously stingy Burke rewarded star writers and editors with all-expenses-paid kayaking trips on the Salmon River.
Through the years, Burke received multiple offers to sell Outside, but he was always resistant, even as the rise of the internet began to erode circulation and advertising income. At first, the larger audiences available online, especially through social media, made the trade-offs seem worthwhile. “We in the outdoor media—and the media, generally—were kind of selling our souls to the platforms for the distribution, because it was so easy and so cheap,” Christopher Jerard, an original staff member of Freeskier magazine and the current vice-president of marketing at Outside, Inc., said. “Then—surprise, surprise—they turned the spigot off, and we were left with no owned audiences.” By 2020, a person familiar with Outside’s editorial mission estimated, the print edition of the magazine had roughly half as many pages as a few decades earlier; Burke, nearing his eighties, finally decided to sell.
When Pocket Outdoor Media began scooping up titles, many of them were still profitable or breaking even, with committed but declining audiences, according to sources familiar with the acquisitions. But Thurston seemed to have bigger ambitions than running a stable of small magazines that more or less broke even. In his initial meeting, he laid out a vision of Outside, Inc., as a tech-media empire, “the Amazon Prime for the active-life-style participant,” with subscription numbers akin to those of Disney+ or Netflix. Rather than depending on the volatile advertising market, the company would get recurring revenue via a membership program, Outside+, which would provide unlimited access to the magazines’ articles and other perks. Thurston has bought up non-media brands, including Gaia, a mapping app; FinisherPix, a photography service; Inntopia, a travel-booking software; and Trailforks, a trail database. (Last year, Thurston also reacquired MapMyFitness, his first company, from Under Armour.) He estimated that the worldwide audience interested in healthy, active life styles was at least a billion people, and argued that the industry was recession-proof.
In the first, flush year of Outside, Inc., the company “was acting like a startup, and spending money like a startup,” a former executive told me. It occupied a new, spacious headquarters, on Pearl Street, Boulder’s main drag. Thurston liked to dream big—instead of, say, fifteen Outside, Inc., podcasts, why not a hundred? After years of operating on a shoestring budget, the abundance felt like a relief. The company implemented diversity goals, cleared years of freelancer debt, and committed to becoming carbon-neutral within five years.
