Seuss's Full Review: Outside Magazine Subscription
I have been a subscriber to Outside for more than 20 years - nearly from issue 1. I have finally decided that enough is enough and I will not be renewing my subscription when it expires this fall. Just one special fashion section too many, I guess. The magazine which gave me so much enjoyment over the years has moved in directions I have chosen not to follow and I, on the other hand, am simply no longer Outside‘s target demographic: I do their ad sales department no favors by continuing my subscription. I still spend a lot of time outside (too much time by most accounts) but I just don’t buy into the “extreme or not at all” ethos I now see promoted by Outside. I apparently never got the memo explaining that camping is now a competitive sport.
My grandmother, God be good to her, first bought me a gift subscription to Outside for my birthday. Thanks, Grandma. When she saw that I enjoyed the magazine she kept renewing it for me. What can I say? Grandma loved me. Made great cookies too. After she died my mother kept renewing my subscription year after year as a kind of remembrance of my Grandmother and because I still enjoyed it. Thanks, Mom. What can I say? Either Mom also loves me or she is a much better actress than I’ve given her credit for all these years.
Outside began life filling a void left by such sport and activity specific magazines as Backpacker, Paddler, Skiing and Rock and Ice: it addressed all outdoor activities. Knowing that backpackers did more than just backpack - they were also likely to kayak or ski or cycle - a group of editors at Rolling Stone (yes, that Rolling Stone) launched Outside as a lifestyle magazine for people who also read the various outdoor sports magazines. They saw a niche and they filled it. At its core Outside had a few top monthly columnists and a healthy amount of environmental reporting. This was augmented by monthly feature articles by some of the best “name” writers in the business (a lesson learned from Rolling Stone was that top rates and editorial freedom bring top writers and top writers bring near instant credibility) and spotlights on what were, at the time, the more eccentric and extreme outdoor activities. Outside was among the first general circulation mags to regularly cover such activities as snowboarding, mountain biking, bouldering, BASE jumping and whitewater rodeo. Outside didn’t just ride the wave of extreme sports, they generated much of the wave.
However, as extreme sports have caught on and become “hip” and “trendy” and a way for advertisers to reach the elusive Gen X consumer they have also become the provenance of the new media. MTV and ESPN have captured and distilled and redefined and repackaged extreme sports and Outside, trying not to be left behind, has given up being the lifestyle magazine for outdoor sports enthusiasts and recast itself as the Sports Illustrated of the X Games, the print adjunct of MTV. That just doesn’t work for me.
Outside is obsessive in its attempts to project itself as “on the edge” and “in your face.” Let’s start with the cover. Two trends are immediately apparent: numbers and exclamation points. Recent cover heads read like a cross between Cosmopolitan and Self-Help Simplified: “Your COOLEST Summer!”, “Get Motivated!”, “Lance Armstrong is Here to Kick Your Ass”, “102 Hottest New Adventures”, “Looking for Trouble? - 28 Ways to Travel on the Edge”, “Fly Fishing Now! - 25 Great Ideas”, “The Top 10 Dazzle-the-Crowd Moves to Help You Conquer Kayaking, Surfing, Climbing, Skating and More”, “Experts Reveal 15 Tricks to Get YOU More Outdoor Nookie.” OK. I made that last one up. But I still open the magazine every month half expecting to see a Cosmo Quiz.
Inside, Outside‘s environmental reporting has just about gone the way of the dodo. It’s hard to keep printing articles about disappearing wilderness or encroaching development or embattled conservationists side by side with two-page full color spreads for the newest, biggest, hottest, most in-your-face SUVs and personal water craft. Apparently, only the largest and newest gas hog is sufficient to get your kayak to the river. Funny, a quick survey of my local riverside put in sites shows the beat up ten-year-old Toyota Tercel or its equally high mileage/low testosterone kin to be the favored vehicle of river runners. I guess they didn’t get the memo either.
Outside‘s monthly columns are a continuing developing/declining story. Tim Cahill’s “Out There” column still makes occasional appearances, but fewer and fewer each year. That is a real shame. Cahill is one of my all-time favorite writers. I’ve collected his books, gone to local readings and signings and even traveled 150 miles to hear him speak and return that night to work the next day. The Thirteenth Warrior is supposedly adapted from a Michael Crichton novel (Lousy movie, I know, but read on) but I’ve often suspected that it is really adapted from one of Cahill’s tamer adventures. “The Hard Way” by Mark Jenkins, apparently a substitute for Cahill, debuted July 1999. Jenkins has a lot of good stories to tell and I usually enjoy reading him but, unlike Cahill, Jenkins starts each trip/adventure/exploration with the intention that it be difficult. It’s an athletic contest where the more difficult the adventure, the more points you score. Cahill’s adventures were often enough extremely difficult but that was never the primary goal. “The Hard Way”seems to promote the concept that someone is keeping score on how you travel. 25 points for hypothermia, 50 points for snakebite, 75 points for being bitten by a hypothermic snake. Meeting new people, learning new things, experiencing new cultures, having a local beer (or 20) and doing the “Peppermint Twist” with your new headhunter friends in Borneo? No points. Executives at CBS apparently got the memo - witness “Survivor.”
Also missing is David Quammen’s “Natural Acts” column. Quammen is one of the country’s best Natural History writers. I’d put him right up there with Stephen Jay Gould or John McPhee. Apparently he was too cereberal or too environmental. His in-depth pieces on various natural phenomenon have apparently been replaced by the “Wild File.” “Wild File” is monthly half page Q&A feature by a series of editors who pick up and drop (or are dropped from) the column as if it had buffalo cooties. Derivative of Cecil Adams’ “The Straight Dope” column of alternative weekly fame, this column has seen Hampton Sides, Jim Collins and Stephanie Gregory at the helm in the last year and God only knows who’s warming up in the bullpen. Compared with Quammen’s thoughtful, well researched and elegantly explained columns, “Wild File” is a pure fluff piece: environmental journalism for the Ritalin generation. To Outside‘s credit, they publish occasional (once or twice a year) pieces by local experts under the “Field Notes” banner, but this feature is so seldomly included as to make no never mind.
Outside still draws some top writers for its features. Much has been made of the fact that Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air began life as an Outside assigned article as was his earlier Into the Wild (also turned into a book.) I have really enjoyed watching Krakauer bloom as a writer. When I first started reading Outside I particularly enjoyed it’s coverage of his climbing exploits and Galen Rowell’s alpine expeditions. Seeing Krakauer evolve into such a respected writer and Rowell into one of the country’s preeminent nature photographers has been particularly satisfying. Krakauer himself profusely thanks Outside not only for the assignment but for publishing his full 30,000 world piece when he returned and supporting his efforts to expand it into book form. Since then, however, Krakauer has gone onto a bigger market. He is now being published by Smithsonian, Time, The New Republic and National Geographic and his Outside pieces are fewer and farther between. Rowell, too, is more often published elsewhere - nowadays primarily in Backpacker.
Outside now attracts the top writers more for byline value than for work: as a place where writers can publish lighter work or where they can publish a small excerpt to hype a new book. Rather than being a showcase for writing talent, Outside now acts more like Leno or Letterman: drawing readers looking for tidbits of writers they read elsewhere. Recent author/article highlights (the last year or so) include a wonderful “Very Short History of Nunavut” by William T. Vollmann (tied in with the publication of his new novel “The Royals”), W. Hodding Carter’s “My Son the Manatee” (Carter’s earlier book describing his efforts to build a Viking knorr and sail it from Greenland to North America also received an early magazine style publication in Outside), Bill Bryson with a short piece on Australian travel adapted from his new book, and an article by James Traub (who is usually published in The New York Times Magazine ) on the Mad River Glen Ski Resort. The last year has also even seen an environmental article by Bruce Barcott (normally published in Audobon, Harpers and The New York Times Magazine.) Fine pieces all, but they appear in Outside more as oddities than as core material.
More typical are in depth celebrity profiles of extreme athletes such as downhill mountain bike racer Marla Streb (complete with nude portrait) or oh-so-cute skateboarder Cara Beth Burnside. Outside also milks the Hollywood cow with features on the making of “The Beach” and the making of “The Perfect Storm” and behind the scenes of “Survivor.” Sure, they take a supercillious, cynical approach to the movies and television shows they cover, but it still provides them a convenient excuse for publishing large photos of George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio. Having their cake and eating it too, this allows Outside to both denigrate and emulate such celebrity driven mags as People or Us.
Outside‘s equipment and gear reviews remain well done and fairly non-biased - useful even, assuming that you are only interested in the very newest or very top end equipment. I can’t shake the feeling that Outside doesn’t consider backpacking with a water bottle and a compass to be “real” backpacking - if I’m not carrying a portable GPS unit and a “hydration system” I must just be a poseur. God only knows what they would think if they knew I don’t even carry a battery powered blender (yes, they reviewed it) or a backpacking espresso maker. Apparently the more exotic and more expensive your gear the more points you score. I really wish I had a chance to read that memo.
The headline writers for the Gear Review section must realize that making every new product sound exciting and necessary is an impossible task and just aren’t trying anymore. From the March 2000 issue: “A SCUBA Regulator That Sucks. But Trust Us, You’ll Like It.” From the July 2000 issue: “Water Shoes That Suck (But In a Good Way).” Dear Guys: The joke didn’t work the first time. Why did you think it would work the second?
Stylistically, Outside draws even more from MTV. Photos tend towards extreme closeups with an off-level orientation: mimicing the handheld camera shots of “reality” videos. In depth feature articles have been replaced by shorter pieces accompanied by numerous easy to digest sidebars. Sidebars themselves tend to be printed on an in-your-face colored screen. Most revealing, though, are the pull quotes and sub-heads: placed with carefully calculated randomness and in carefully unformatted formatting throughout the articles, they employ only the gnarliest verbs. Blast, thrash, dominate, rip, dare, survive. I’ve got a whole new selection of power action verbs to use the next time I rewrite my resume. Outside‘s pull quotes read like a cross between a post game interview with the latest X Games Skateboard Champ and the old “Biff! Pow! Wham!” of Batman and Robin vs. The Penguin’s Henchmen.
What finally persuaded me not to renew was the monthly special sections. I’m a realist. I know that these special sections are for advertisers and not for readers. But I still can’t help but feel that Outside is telling me, personally, in these sections that I am not worthy to read their magazine. I also believe that these black helicopters the UN has following me are beaming subversive messages into my dental work but that is neither here nor there.
Periodic “Adventure Travel” sections (2-4 a year) leave me ashamed that I have not been to Kyrgizstan. I am left with the notion that kayaking is only worth doing on the Bio-Bio or in Baja and that I am a fool for messing around on the Shenandoah or Potomac. Hiking anywhere but Nepal is unworthy of my time. Basically, any outdoor activity that doesn’t include round trip airfare, tips, taxes and transfers and a T1 connection in my hotel room is on a par with driving a Winnebago to Mt. Rushmore. I know that I shouldn’t take it seriously or personally but I’m a wee bit prone to paranoia.
Special “Training” and “Body Work” sections (3-4 a year) are more laughable than threatening. Because all outdoor activity is now a competition (so I surmise the memo read), we apparently need to train full time to participate. We also apparently need to wax our chests and wear lycra. Even the editors of this section occasionally have a hard time taking this attitude seriously. Witness the recent evaluation of flatwater river tubing as a training activity: ‘difficulty = 0, works glutes, abs and forearms.’ Difficulty = 0? I’m usually doing a few hundred one armed 12 ounce curls with a can of Bud on my tubing trips. And that’s the extent of ANY “training” I’m going to do.
And the piece de resistance: the special fashion sections (2-4 a year). The editors and photographers find a sufficiently outdoorsy and photogenic group of people (skydivers from Florida, river guides from Utah, bush pilots from Alaska) and dress them up in designer Outside wear and photograph them in action. $90 Armani T-shirts for floating down the Green River. $65 Versace silk socks for landing a plane on a glacier. $600 Gucci leather purse for holding your altimeter while plummeting towards the earth with matching desk set for filing that memo. Please. Who in the world do they think their audience is? Not me.
I often judge a magazine based not so much on its content so much as on its final page. I think that this really tells what the mag is about. Here, Outside does not let down. For as long as I’ve been a subscriber Outside has wrapped up each issue with the “Parting Shot.” One simple photograph, beautifully reproduced, with caption limited to the photo’s location. They are a hoot. It’s the one section the editors haven’t tinkered with and it remains the mag’s most enduring and endearing feature.
I can’t fault Outside for the direction its taken. When they started covering these offbeat sports they had no idea that they would become so legitimate or pervasive. Publishing is a business and you’ve gotta ride the wave when it comes by. And if I was really really into MTV or extreme sports or Nissan SUVs I wouldn’t have any problem at all with Outside. But I’m not, and I do. Nothing personal, Grandma, I still love you.
12 issues - Edited for the active adult. It is a contemporary lifestyle magazine that features sports, fitness, photography, adventure, travel, and po...More at SuperMagDeals.com
12 issues - Edited for the active adult. It is a contemporary lifestyle magazine that features sports, fitness, photography, adventure, travel, and po...More at Subscription Addiction
12 issues - Edited for the active adult. It is a contemporary lifestyle magazine that features sports, fitness, photography, adventure, travel, and po...More at SpeedyMags.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2010 Shopping.com, Inc.