Legacy outlet profiles "subversive" would-be conqueror of legacy outlets; incompetent journalism, including the author's own, goes unmentioned
Competition is healthy when the race is run in the right direction, but the unabashed aim here is just tastier junk food for the eyeballs and ears of slack-jawed pimple-poppers
The content now produced by the online versions of running magazines exists solely to support a media climate in which all winds ultimately blow in the direction of page loads for the publisher and visibility for both author and subject. This reality by no means enforces misleading, self-contradicting, or ridiculous and unnecessary content, but it certainly opens the floodgates to such emotionally fraught nonsense—e.g., false allegations of misdeeds nicely complemented in this bizarro world by the suppression of proven misdeeds—predominating over often-uncomfortable facts and, just as importantly, over engaging in real work instead of just adding more rotten eggs to the clickbait omelet.
It’s therefore easy to imagine some writer studying this blog to ascertain what five or six aspects of today’s running media most strongly annoy its creator, then authoring this article just to see the results in a week or so of someone using wild swings of a rhetorical lightsaber to subdue an overripe commentarial watermelon suspended one foot off the ground. It’s a profile by Martin Fritz Huber for Outside Online of some recent college graduates intent on reinvigorating what they see as a geriatric and musty running-media environment, mainly by publishing meta-scandalous videos of underfed-looking young men in the Pacific Northwest. If anyone needed more evidence that the University of Oregon must reject every applicant with an SAT score over 1,000, the characters in this account are it.
Beneath the surface hilarity of a legacy outlet so hungry for visitors that it publishes a story about spy-cam agitators seeking to lead the charge to supplant legacy running outlets—none of which are named, as if dozens or even a half-dozen of these exist—the key point is this: There is no mention in this story of fixing bad running journalism, because the blinding problem of bad running journalism itself goes unmentioned. Not once does either the author or his interviewees touch on the obligatory elements of any journalistic enterprise, such as not lying or distorting reality to make a point, not omitting critical information dispositive of your thesis, not using quotes from unreliable sources, and avoiding other assorted other grand mal professional seizures.
Huber, of course, will never point at that pile of elephant dung in the virtual media room; he can’t, because he's an established part of the relentless bullshit machine himself, operating under the guidance of a cowardly, dishonest, and startlingly unimaginative editor who herself is part of a proud anti-white, anti-male in-house editorial campaign. But the Gen Zers Huber talked to apparently have no concerns of their own about the running world currently drowning in bad journalism, since this would have been an opportune time to, you know, mention that. This alone reveals their whole project to be completely misguided—not only in failing to take advantage of the chance to fulfill a critical industry need, but also in tossing more flaming trash onto an already towering, smoldering Internet landfill of running-related jibber-jabber.
To be clear on the variables in play, all of which are delicious: If Martin Fritz Huber contacts you about a story for Outside Online—and I’m assuming he, not they, initiated this story—it means that Huber has either enlisted you in a smear-job or made you its target. Huber’s niche within the Outside bullshit-generation colossus is making others in the running community look bad to varying degrees, no matter how far up his ass he needs to reach for both a villain and an accompanying transgression. Maybe these kiddos knew this, maybe not. But even as proud U. of O. alumni, they had to have at least anticipated that the central mission of anyone writing about Gen Zers hoping to render the writer’s primary cash-cow obsolete is to make those Gen Zers look as daft and hapless as possible, albeit with love-taps and sideswipes.
In evaluating New Generation Track and Field through the lens of a known dissembler, my challenge was to decide which of Huber’s observations of NGR’s creators are sincere, which are accurate, and which manage to be neither.
To emphasize a point made above, Huber and NGTF founder Ben Crawford both avoid mentioning any legacy outlets by name—convenient for Huber because it allows him to skirt his own deviant behavior. The list of extant corporate running outlets is short; the Outside colossus now owns every publication of significance in the United States except for Runner’s World, which became part of the Hearst empire in 2018. The jarring absence of detail on this pivotal matter—I mean, call the enemy straight to account, right?—is one of many issues degrading what could have been a funnier take-down of Crawford—who really does call himself and his methods subversive—no matter how hypocrisy-stained its provenance.
Huber has fun with the frat-boy approach to promoting the sport shared by Crawford and Chris Chavez, the patron saint of aspiring young clowns in the running world thanks to his success in cultivating a following despite ingrained, gritty incompetence, brilliantly juvenile prose, and a perfect lack of objectivity, the latter having been long ago sacrificed at the altar of terminal fanboyism. Though Huber deftly plays the role of a committed hack, he’s well-read and puts work into his word choices, and it would be interesting to see how much more forceful his thoughts on both might be if he were not constrained by the editorial standards of even a bad legacy outlet. No matter what his heart holds, he probably realizes with dismay how much in common he has with Chavez as an extension of Molly Mirhashem’s mission to litter the online joggerscape with artless lying and other forms of Wokish deviance, and it probably makes him feel better to not think about this and just cash the checks Outside CEO Robin Thurston sends him.
Crawford is bent on the idea that what Huber correctly labels a niche—some guys running around making videos of elite runners doing silly, everyday things—can be expanded into a nationwide model. Even if Crawford thinks people over 40 are too slow to keep up with a changing sport, someone should probably tell him that most runners of any age, be they joggers or serious competitors, simply don’t care enough about the fruits of his labors to pay for them.
If Crawford et al. perceived anything untoward in Huber’s story, it wasn’t enough to discourage them from linking to the piece on Instagram. This seems perfectly appropriate for people in an age cohort primed to adopt an “all publicity is good publicity” approach to online business- and reputation-building.
Via a flurry of internal links, I’ve already indicated some the many failures the legacy running media (which, contra Crawford, has in fact shifted plenty over the years, just not in useful ways) has racked up lately. Here’s the part of the post where I’d say, “I’m not just bitching—they should do this instead” and list a bunch of things “they,” meaning these fresh-faced and allegedly inventive scamps, could do to help running journalism recover. But in pointing out with depressing regularity that no venture founded on an Entertainment Weekly model could possibly coincide with earnest journalism, I even bore myself after a while.
On the ctutopic of legacy outlets, I have a feeling that at least a few of them are indeed struggling. It’s hard to tell how many of the hastily contrived, or at least shotgun-blast-style, opt-in e-mails from Women’s Running and other Outside pubs pitching seminars and other paid content are drawing subscribers; the fact that I myself can’t imagine spending a dime on any of it adds little to that analysis.
Somewhat relatedly, I took down most of my personal website, which has been up in some form since 1998. I’ll say for now that this is for maintenance and repurposing the server space, but I may not maintain a sire other than this one moving forward. Call it no more than a symbolic act of flouncing, but the Web has become over-strewn with similar sites, all hosted by other people who couldn’t be real writers and headed for the ease of supplying chum to fitness publications instead, then went a step further and created a website to brag about this banal habit. For years, kemibe.com was little more than a convenient list of links to my two books and the hundred-plus fitness-related articles I wrote, and now I prefer that finding that stuff be more inconvenient. To ensure exhibiting maximal twat-faced pissiness, I even excluded all 183 captures from the Internet Archive.
What I may do here, starting soon, is review a lot of those articles, especially the old training-related ones, here on Beck of the Pack, as if they were authored by someone else (and in some ways, they were). Some of the more popular of these were published before the advent of GPS and everything that goes with it, so taking a fresh look at them could be fun, and there are things unrelated to technology that I would have mixed in had I possessed the wisdom or editorial freedom.