Readers!

I wasn’t going to do a newsletter this week, but then The New Yorker went and published a story about the collapse of Outside Magazine. They pegged it as starting four years ago (when it was last sold) but it’s been on downward slide since before then, for one simple reason: their repeated and long standing refusal to pay their writers on time.

This isn’t news to anyone who’s been reading this newsletter back when it was on Tinyletter. Outside treated its freelancers like dirt, delaying payment for months or even longer, since at least 2017. I’m relatively sure I heard about payment issues before then, but that’s the date that sticks out in my mind, backed up by self-reported experiences on Who Pays. In 2021, they reached an agreement to pay $150,000 in overdue invoices. At the time, former junior staffers told me that they were pressured to keep assigning even though they knew their writers weren’t going to get paid anytime soon, and even offered to write articles themselves to save money, requests that were denied. Throw on top the decision to assign features so bros could do favors for other bros and it’s a place I told freelancers to avoid. By the time an editor at Outside-owned Triathlete dedicated a whole day to bashing me on Twitter, their publications had been on my “no never” list longer than I’d lived in this house (I don’t remember his name, he’s a zero to me).

Am I boasting? Not really. I know too many people hurt by a