Trail Runner's editor takes a crack at independent publishers, accusing them of the very things that makes her incompetent and unsuitable for the industry

Zoe Rom should just accept that real running fans aren't interested in unedited garbage advertorials served up by clueless cowards of privilege, and that real writers don't "service" their readers

Trail Runner was once a print magazine. It now exists as a de facto blog, with its nominal editor-in-chief a mostly literate but viciously gobsmacked younger Millennial jogger named Zoe Rom. Ms. Rom’s job, at least as she sees it, is to assign stories mostly to other straight, white people from affluent families—including her coach and other personal acquaintances—while railing about the industry’s urgent need for greater ethnic and socioeconomic diversity and inclusion.

In a world guided by sane standards, Rom’s hypocrisies in this one area would make her an unemployable laughingstock even were Trail Runner not a roiling swamp of typos, falsehoods, and malign social-engineering precepts. In the world we live in, Rom is a neurotic, enfeebled, and mostly oblivious tool of the uniparty establishment’s fitness-media arm whose job with Outside is safe as long as she keeps pushing demented but obligatory narratives concerning race and ethnicity, sexual and gender identity, and the need to admire and compensate female athletes, coaches, and media figures on sexism-combating principle—including influencers almost too fat to heave their bulk into and out of their clown cars—even when no one attends, reads about, or watches any of the relevant action.

Rom is a capering, posturing idiot who has helped ruin both Trail Runner and Women’s Running in just the couple of years she’s been allowed to retain her title. None of the material these publications produce is of any interest to anyone besides the people profiled, who in turn are always selling a product or service that’s both expensive and either worthless or redundant. But she does get to call herself the editor of an “official” media outlet, even if wise people do not boast about this status to discerning readers these days given the corporate media outlets’ collective popularity and how much the public trusts them.

Attempting to leverage her position, Rom decided last week to take aim at a dangerous group of people: writers who also cover running topics, but are actually accountable to their readers and aren’t required to push false narratives, cater to advertisers, or answer to greed-driven sloplords like Outside CEO Robin Thurston. In a February 6 article in which she bemoaned the independent-media competition, Rom even unfurled a new name for a bending the truth to achieve or retain in-group popularity: “fan service.” And Rom wrote the entire plaintive, unintentionally hilarious piece as if genuinely unaware of being personally beset by every one of the inherent ills allegedly afflicting the “content creators” she’s hoping to steer us* away from.

Rom opens the piece by asserting that because “running is booming,” more people are deciding to write about it for money. Although she claims to believe that “this is an overwhelmingly good thing” and that “Platforms like Substack … allow creators to monetize their work, which is great because it leads to a higher degree of professionalization,” Rom is here to warn you about the dark underbelly of this unregulated yammer-fest:

But there’s a fine line between good-faith content creators and hucksters, the latter lacking the necessary experience and expertise needed to back up what they’re selling and therefore lean into theatricality to disguise or distract from the superficiality of their takes.

It’s unclear exactly what may have inspired Rom to advise people to avoid platforms like Substack. But she’s clearly not referring to me with any of the complaints and advisories in this article. After all, my first piece for Running Times was published over 25 years ago, and not even a hater would accuse me of either inexperience or superficial takes. Rom could very well be describing someone who knows nothing while resisting all attempts by others to educate her, like, say, Zoe Rom, David Roche, and most of the harried, research-phobic, and startlingly innumerate people supplying articles to Outside as well as Runner’s World these days. (Runner’s World is guilty of publishing a great deal of bullshit, but for the most part is not characterized self-referential, self-righteous editorials like those distributed by Outside’x e-rags.)

Continuing her gibbering festival of psychological projection, Rom asserts that the rise of Substack et al. is owed to people she calls “fans.” These people, she says, “aren’t as interested in objective, unbiased storytelling.”

Funny. Rom should go out and meet some genuine running fans. Along with most intelligent citizens, these weirdos in fact enjoy objective and unbiased—that is, accurate—reporting. If they want to read editorials, they’ll seek out dedicated opinion pieces. If they want to read nonsense that conflates the two while mangling the facts, they can read whatever Rom et al. are churning out.

Rom then defines “fan service” as “any creative pandering to the impulses of a vocal fan collective.” In other words, fan service is lying to suit an occasion—e.g., an uncomfortable emotion inflicted on you by the world, or the defense of an Instagram swindle.

Fan service is doing whatever it takes to draw clicks while making sure all output adheres to rigid, unexamined ideologies in a 100-percent lopsided way. Fan service is claiming, in the service of women, that men are women. Fan service is announcing that pitching a story about “only white dudes” will earn you a “NOPE NOPE NOPE” while assigning almost every story to white people, hanging around the pastiest “dudes” in Colorado, and even recently getting engaged to one of those pasty “dudes.”

Fan service is Zoe Rom.

“Fans are great,” Rom continues. But then she offers another warning:

creating content based on the whims, interests, and desires of the most vocal of your fans rarely results in the best storytelling or journalism … Hot takes might generate likes, clicks, and, yes, fans, but measured, well-reported journalism that ends in additional questions rarely does. The comments section is not “the community.”

Rom is again describing her own broken approach to being a public idea-broker. She does or oversees exactly no “well-reported journalism,” a curious-sounding concept that probably bears some resemblance to “well-reported stories” or “accurate journalism.” She pushes bullshit and ducks the blowback, which Thurston allows her to get away with. And despite her professed distaste for “the comments section,” this is just another of Rom’s excuses for hiding from people who make inconvenient noises about her fact-starved stories and absentee editing. And she may actually climax on occasion from perpetrating hypocrisies; in response to something I wrote about Roche—her similarly ignorant, pussified, and insincere coach—Rom, rather than explain what was wrong about it, used “the comments section” herself —and, along with a bevy of other wailing, science-denying losers, tried scolding a content creator into changing his behavior.

Rom also introduces the assumption here that independent writers are all grifters like she and her besties are. She assumes, for example, that Substack writers tailor their content in a way that maximizes their income even at the expense of all ethics. While she’s correct about Substack being a haven for plenty of grifters, the problem with this judgment, from the perspective of her thesis, is that many of these grifters are braying libtards whose every pro-BLM, pro-lockdowns, anti-human-flourishing stance hews with Rom’s. The most popular Substack writer by subscription count is a classic glowering Karen named Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston-area academic who does nothing but lie, bitch about Donald Trump, and make excuses for the Biden administration.

But are there any independent writers covering distance running who are playing a similarly sleazy game? Since Rom doesn’t identify any of the platforms she’s imploring readers to avoid, the precise identity of the problems she’s seeing is unclear.

Rom then spends a paragraph trying to defend her own employer. She does this, in part, by bragging that some corporate outlets employ more than one writer:

Having more than one writer, and heck, brand, under one roof means the work of getting said clicks and ad dollars is spread over more people, ideas, and perspectives.

It’s both incredible and incredibly entertaining that this gibbering cretinette considers herself the voice of both industry experience and authority.

Also, Rom is lying. She claims that she oversees writers who offer multiple perspectives, but this is straight-up bullshit.

None of the Outside e-rags would ever publish an essay suggesting that men are not actually women. None of them would ever publish anything pointing out that running’s “inclusion” efforts have produced nothing but a shambling parade of liars and cheaters championing self-mutilation in the name of authenticity and the purposeful accumulation of dangerously high levels of body fat. None of them would ever publish anything unflattering about the covid “vaccines” or the measures the government took in 2020 to ruin people’s lives. Not one of them would ever let a female athlete air candid grievances about what it’s like to lose to males posing as females or share a locker room with one of these “women.”

These e-rags have had a solid four years to allow reality to pervade the various delusions and misinformation they’ve been propaganda. They are not about to start now. Everyone involved is too much of a piece of shit committed to getting either a weak-but-boastworthy book deal or another mansion out of this madness.

Rom continues trying to build a case for the insincerity of Substackers et al. by hammering away at the supposed incentives, even the obligation, to journalistically misbehave:

While it’s tempting to assume a “if you build it they will come” strategy is adequate, any content creator who makes enough income to support themselves can tell you that tending to their fans, community, or patrons becomes a major part of the labor.

Not only is Rom wrong to assume that Substack is loaded with dirtbags looking to make a buck by lying, she’s also wrong to assume that everyone who publishes on Substack is intent on earning enough money to live on. That was never my aim, and it would be impossible for someone like me to do anyway given both my resistance to sharing posts on, or even using social media and the guarantee that I will upset too many people to achieve “fans” at scale. People who take issue with both Wokish loons and Ziopathic warmongers, and do so impolitely, while focusing primarily on something as boring as distance running are not clearing a path toward great popularity. And promising to never paywall posts—and sticking to this—is probably a good way to discourage people from paying, as are routine concessions that I plan to escape this via traumatic self-annihilation at an undetermined but overdue and not altogether remote juncture.

Rom maximizes the bullshit factor with this paragraph:

Since I started working at Trail Runner, we’ve increased our output by over 300 percent … Our process involves several rounds of interviewing, editing, review, and fact-checking a production work that slows down the process (in a good way!). Influencers and content creators just working to get their newsletter, blog post, or podcast out the door are beholden to no such process. What you gain in efficiency, you lose in quality.

Anyone who regularly visits Trail Runner knows just what a morass of typos and other mistakes it is. And even while claiming that Trail Runner is putting out four times as much “output” as before, she suggests it’s “content creators” who are guilty of rush-jobs.

And I’d love to see Rom say this one while standing before God:

I also crave complex stories that challenge my opinions and beliefs, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Other than the fact that any topic is complex to a constitutively watery and frail mind, this is also horseshit. Rom is simply a weak and complacent person who surrounds herself with weak and complacent people. She refuses to be challenged. She preaches and panders and proselytizes, and she has never to my knowledge admitting to making a single error despite being a nonstop comedy-drama of whining, double standards, and begging for things she doesn’t need or deserve because she’s a coddled, shiftless, gravely incurious woman who is in the wrong vocational field.

Rom’s coda is about as cleverly crafted as her “Running is booming” opening line:

We can all start by investigating our own preferences and desires and supporting voices that challenge our preconceived beliefs and ideas. We can pay attention to our attention and spend that precious attention more wisely.

We, we, WHEEEEEEE! It’s fitting that Rom is all but shouting at herself to summon the nerve to face criticism while still pretending that unchained pundits are the problem, and that she and the dismal, superfluous publications she’s desperate to protect are imperfect but still any discerning runner’s best media option.

Below is a graphic display of the corporate running media’s recent reliability in a just single area. I’ve written about the same topic and would be happy to have an independent panel of judges compare my work on transgender athletes with that of Rom, Emilia Benton, and other esteemed and widely read experts.

All photos are either real or fake unless otherwise noted.