Rachel Monroe covers the Southwest for the New Yorker, where she recently wrote “The Decline of Outside Magazine Is Also the End of a Vision of the Mountain West.”
It’s a requiem of sorts for the heyday of Outside — which, for decades, has offered its readers some of the most ambitious outdoor and investigative journalism found anywhere.
Launched in the 1970s by veterans of Rolling Stone magazine, Outside published the original versions of seminal works of adventure journalism, like Sebastian Junger’s "The Perfect Storm" and Jon Krakauer’s "Into Thin Air."
Monroe joined The Show to discuss how, at its height, that’s the kind of editorial ambition that Outside was known for.
Full conversation
RACHEL MONROE: I talked to some folks from the early days who kinda contrasted the Outside Magazine approach to me with the National Geographic. If National Geographic told a story, it's like it’s a hushed and reverent account of a walk through the jungle. Outside was like the writers were gonna be riding there in a rattling pickup truck, maybe getting in trouble along the way.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, and importantly, this wasn't just part of the journalistic tradition and zeitgeist of the moment. It also was a place that, as you write, crystallized a certain American perception of the West.
MONROE: Yeah, I think it was really important that Outside Magazine, for most of its legacy and particularly its golden years, was based in Santa Fe, so we have a media industry that's so concentrated on the coasts in a lot of ways and that, for better or for worse, but that impacts a lot of the stories that are told.
And this was a magazine that was very explicitly looking, pointed in another direction, oriented in another way, sitting among the mountains and everybody who worked there was a person who spent time in the West fishing, biking, skiing in the '70s and '80s that felt radical.
DINGMAN: So it is not necessarily a new story for a magazine like that to be purchased by a very rich person who changes the philosophy of what the place is, but I do think it would be interesting in this case to talk about the specifics of how that happened at Outside in particular. Four years ago, the magazine was purchased by Robin Thurston. Who's Robin Thurston?
MONROE: Robin Thurston is a former elite cyclist who got his start. He founded an early fitness tracking app. He sold it to Under Armour, made a bunch of money, and has since then has been in this tech entrepreneur space.
DINGMAN: And would it be fair to say that one of the things that he did when he bought Outside Inc was to try to transform it from a magazine that was focused primarily on long form journalism into a lifestyle brand?
MONROE: I don't know if it was necessarily the intention going in was to turn Outside away from this legacy of really high quality, serious investigative reporting and long-form reporting. It just seemed like where it was, it was not where the new owner's priorities were.
There was a particular story that came up, multiple times that that I think rubbed a lot of folks the wrong way, where, Outside had published a quite amazing investigation into a climber who had sexually assaulted several women in the climbing world, and this was incredibly well reported and well written and really indicted the climbing community because a lot of this was an open secret. A lot of people, these women told their story and weren't listened to and people kept giving this guy another chance, and it was really awful. And he since then has been sentenced to, I believe, life in prison for all these assaults.
DINGMAN: Wow.
MONROE: But Outside, this is the classic Outside story where it's holding this community to account and the new person running the content operation at Outside, in an all-hands meeting said, “Hey, that story was great, but that's the kind of thing we need to move away from, because what we need to focus on more is, we're trying to motivate people to go outside, and so what we want is like positive, uplifting.” I think for a lot of people that was the final straw.
DINGMAN: Yes, well, if I'm not mistaken, last month, a number of the magazine's editors, writers and photographers signed an open letter to the ownership of the magazine asking to be removed from the masthead.
In that open letter, they say, quote, “Despite the vast sums of money you have raised to consolidate the adventure media industry, your company now seems intent on destroying what Outside once stood for.”
MONROE: Yeah, I think, at the time of acquisition, a lot of people told me that they were incredibly hopeful. I mean, Outside, we don't want to say, I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture.
At the time of the acquisition five years ago, the magazine had a lot of problems. They were really notorious for not paying freelancers or paying them years later, they had hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that they owed to writers.
So people thought, “Hey, yeah, this person's coming in. He's a committed cyclist. He seems to really want to bring money into this thing that a lot of people are really committed to, and it felt initially there was a real commitment to usher it into the next era, basically.
DINGMAN: You write in the piece that you get the sense that the frustration that a lot of Outside staffers were feeling was indicative of some larger sentiment. and one of them in particular says to you, quote, “It just seemed like to a lot of us watching from afar, is this the way people are now? Is this the way they live their life?”
MONROE: That was the great writer Hampton Sides, who's another early outside contributor and wonderful writer (for) Outside in the early days, it was the lifestyle that it's sold was this idea that you could go out west and spend time in nature and live a cheaper life closer to, be closer, more in touch with nature, more in touch with reality, and then that was available to people who sort of had this bold adventurous, curious, questing spirit.
And it just seems harder and harder to do that now with the way so much of the Mountain West has just gotten incredibly expensive, has gotten privatized, and the spread of tech, and tech wealth into a lot of these towns into Montana and Idaho.
I just think that that's, in a way, this idea of tech money coming in and wanting the brand of Outside but not committing to what actually made it great. It just felt like it tied into these larger forces that people in the Mountain West are contending with.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I saw a stat somewhere and I can't remember if this was in your piece or not, but over 70% of the West's population lives in cities.
So it just makes me think about what you were just saying that as this place that helped form the perception of an appreciation of the West is changing, the actual constitution of the West is also undergoing this metamorphosis.
MONROE: Definitely. And I think that the outdoor adventure that Outside writers, Outside, used to cover both in investigative pieces and then also in fun travel gear review type work, it's increasingly a luxury good. It's harder and harder to be a dirtbag climber, just camping out. The people who work in these mountain towns often have to live an hour away or something cause there's no affordable housing for them. The dream that we're sold in images is increasingly distant from the reality of it.
