Everything changed when they told me that putting fishing flies in my cap was uncouth.
That happened last June, page 24, to be precise, just after the Outside elite censured anyone who has ever picked up a fishing pole for not referring to it as a rod. Apparently theirs has been misplaced.
I would have let it slide if it hadn’t grown worse. Yet it seems like every time I open an issue of Outside magazine, I’m being told I don’t dress right, live in the wrong place and am so behind the times that I’ve never even chartered a sea plane to surf in the Maldives. Oh, and apparently I don’t listen to nearly enough Jack Johnson.
But it doesn’t stop there. I don’t need to open the book for October cover-poseur Harrison Ford to teach me to grab a tweed coat and black leather belt before jogging along with his “Rules of Adventure.” And in their latest publishing foray, Outside GO (presumably just a “P” away from Outside GQ), enquiring minds can find the reason why Kevin Costner “always risks it.” (Wait, lemme guess: Risk what?)
The easy target arrives every August when the magazine tells us “Where to Live Now” (sorry, Crested Butte, but you’re no Oakland), just a month after guitar guru Ben Harper signed on as a columnist this year. Am I missing something here? Better check in with May cover model Anderson Cooper and find out.
They say there’s no such thing as bad press. I’m arguing otherwise. With a name like Outside, this is a publication that has clearly lost sight of its mission.
Exactly what that mission is has likely changed through the years, right along with the medium of magazines itself. Magazines sell products, sure, but my mailbox is already full of fall catalogs, so the odds of me perusing a two-page spread on street-tough office shoes is pretty slim, no matter what kind of cologne Ewan McGregor is wearing this month. I smell a trend that I don’t particularly care for.
I can recall way back in the day, when this outdoors market was just beginning to emerge as a viable product in its own right. I was working as a cub reporter at The Washington Post when I sent a letter off to someplace Montana where a guy named Tim Cahill lived and worked as a columnist for the recently discovered pub. I sent him a clip or two, expressing interest in an internship of some sort. To my surprise, he replied, essentially saying he thought my work was decent enough already. His distilled advice: Just keep doing it.
Cahill eventually moved up the masthead and now serves as a rarely published Editor at Large. Meanwhile, I managed to work my way into that magazine as well as others of its ilk over the years. But it wasn’t long before I lost my taste for the New York politics that seem to have now gone Hollywood in search of the same Madison Avenue alchemy that pairs kayaks with Su- barus and herpes medication while glancing over the more meaty issues of the so-called active life.
Now the magazine simply shows up in my mailbox every month along with a public relations insert telling me why this edition is even better than the last. I have to dig deep to find a story that genuinely interests me anymore (or that hasn’t already run on this page), although the photography inside the cover rarely fails to impress.
But perhaps the best addition to the book over the years is known as “The Woodshed,” Outside’s monthly mea culpa, where the editors confess the mistakes they made in the previous issues. They might do well to dedicate more space beneath that title in coming editions, admitting they’ve sold their soul and using that as a launching point for a return to the “keep doing it” Cahill philosophy that established the early Outside as a magazine worth reading.
If he’s no longer hip enough for them, then they can always fall back on the most astute insights to emerge from this month’s cover story. Right up front, Harrison Ford admits, “I might not be your main man for this subject.” But it’s the closing kicker that ultimately says it all: “I’m glad I don’t have to write this (stuff).”
