Outside, which owns most of the niche fitness pubs still in business, will be gone by 2025 at this rate
If my boss bragged about capitalizing on worldwide suffering and started slashing jobs, I'd be tempted to mail it in, too. But there's still no excuse for intentionally bad output
As of mid-May of last year, Outside, Inc.—which operates around three dozen media outlets, most of them exclusively online—employed about 580 people. Six months later, that number had been reduced to about 435, or 75 percent of the total as of Mother’s Day. This happened in two reductions that appear to have been strategically spaced; The Trek covered both the first and the second of these in detail.
There are two basic ways to model this: Linear decay, which assumes that Outside, Inc. will simply bleed about 145 employees every six months until it disappears; and half-life, which proposes that the company will cut a quarter of its staff per year but never vanish outright.
If the half-life model holds, then Outside, Inc. will cleave another 110 or so employees by Thanksgiving, and at least 80 more by mid-autumn of 2024. But in the more ambitious linear model, the company would methodically lay off 145 people this year, in 2024, and in 2025, causing it to wink out of existence entirely a few months after the next World Athletics Championships.
By “the company,” I mean CEO Robin Thurston, who in 2021 produced one of the most openly avaricious pandemic quotes I’ve seen: “I think COVID presented an opportunity that was once in a lifetime.”
That February, Thurston purchased what was then a flagging company far behind on paying its freelancers’ invoices, but already far ahead in the “Cancel white men, except for the female men” nonsense-wars. This ethos pervaded Outside, Inc. further when Thurston merged it with Pocket Outdoor Media, the company he had bought in 2019. Pocket Outdoor Media provided to the expanding mix the already Wokeblown offerings Women’s Running and Trail Runner, along with Podium Runner, since digested from within.
Here’s the letter Thurston or a PR firm wrote to his own employees, both the retained and the canned, after the November layoffs and decided for some reason should be published on Medium.
I read some of the goodbye tweet-threads from some of the employees sacrificed from editorial or “content” positions in both May and November, and it was disheartening. I don’t know any of them and didn’t read any of the publications they were a part of, but people still exist who want to write stories and give earnest advice about outdoor sports for a wide audience, and never got into the business expecting it would become the swamp of unaccountability, by-design internal balkanization, and weirdness it stands as today.
I know what that’s like. But I also have been working almost exclusively from a recumbent position for long enough to be sanguine about the durability of such opportunities, and to be grateful to have had them even after they disappear. Getting paid to be a writer these days is not the task it once was, and feels more like directly trading a set of requested words for cash rather than dealing in ideas.
Anyway, by eliminating 145 or so jobs in 2022, Thurston reduced the annual Outside, Inc. payroll by maybe $40,000 times 145, or close to $6 million. I’m sure those people all landed somewhere, although not at Twitter.
And I have to wonder whether Thurston actually consciously eliminated any specific people or whether he simply looked at a slate of positions and decided to ax a number of them, maybe based on parent pub site metrics. He’s clearly the type of person who sees his employees as tokens and not animated creatures with conscious intentions and desires of their own, so it’s unlikely he gets to know any of them. Whatever the case, a number of people are still in the Outside fold who are some combination of negligent, incompetent, unedited, dishonest, and unwilling to confront criticism.
As much as I have unloaded on David Roche for his uniquely unreadable Trail Runner columns and on Zoe Rom, the magazine’s editor-in-chief who apparently doesn’t read anything she approved for the Web and has openly adopted “No white guys except my homies” motto, I can’t say I blame them for not respecting the person who ultimately pays them or the publications he still maintains. I’m just surprised that people don’t take a little more pride in work they are paid to do or merely out of respect for their audience. Or “the craft,” if you want to get mawkish about it.
Thurston seems to have backed off on the idea of getting even richer by turning an arm of the Outside, Inc. business into a cryptocurrency marketplace, with NFT the currency of choice. I don’t follow finance, real or imagined, and would be as confused as the people who do even if I did, but my sense is that crypto isn’t looking as rosy as it did a year ago at this time. Or even three months ago at this time. According to this thread, Outside, Inc. didn’t lose a ton of cash in that venture; it just failed to take off, which is just as bad as a loss when you’re counting on something as a sure thing.
The wealth-management firm BlackRock alone controls $10 trillion in assets. Ten trillion dollars is enough dough to power the American war machine for over a decade. I suspect these people and their friends have been watching the crypto market pretend to stand alone from central banks while extending their tendrils into it. Cryptocurrency will go away or be cleverly absorbed by the central banks the day the World Economic Forum decides it requires a new distraction for people aspiring to the mere toenail clippings of those who think about money and control and nothing else.
I am sure Thurston’s investors are eager, generally speaking, to see him take the whole enterprise public so they, too, can make some money. And I have no idea what his ultimate aim for Outside, Inc. as a tech company. He seems to want users, or clients, or patients, or whatever paying customers will be to be able to sculpt virtual-reality universes for themselves in which they can play the hero. The whole vision seems heavy in personalized maps and digital “experiences” that may be oriented toward someday strapping on a special helmet and goggles, getting on an incline-decline treadmill, and becoming the winner of whatever race in whatever world you see yourself in, be it in Thailand or New York City.
This is the rich person’s version of getting really drunk and lying to all your friends about how fast you were back in the day, before the Internet could appreciate your talents. Enjoy your best self as you never were, harmlessly and without being pestered by humans or reality for a while. Why not? I have no idea if this is even part of the vision or not, but it’s the kind of technology I see people like Mark Zuckerberg playing around with. I wonder if Ted Kaczynski has access to newspapers now that he’s in a medical prison facility instead of the supermax down yonder in Florence. He should be allowed to have a Twitter account to express his views on technological developments since his incarceration.
One thing is certain, and that’s that the Outside, Inc. publications providing content now are not going to do so for long. I like Thurston’s idea of not relying on any advertising revenue, but I bet he changes his mind if Outside finds itself hungry for subscribers. But if he sheds them, where will they go? Can pubs like Women’s Running be packaged and sold off, or will they technically remain alive forever while slowly progressing to a point of adding no new content other than films?
In two years, I may have a lot more company on Substack. More likely, though, most of the people who are churning out content for these pubs now will just express their ideas on social platforms and make a living in ways besides writing. All because of one man, really, a guy who probably has a tattoo of Mitt Romney on his ass, or at least a poster of him on the master bedroom wall.
Mark your calendars—another round of cuts is coming in mid-May, unless market forces compel a move even sooner. And if you know any of the people who were already sacrificed from the shrinking Outside borg, thank the people who put in their time there and spread the good word about roving around outdoors. If they were doing this out of love, they’ll find a home somewhere in their sport.