On Plagiarism

What a scandal at Outside means for the future of outdoor journalism

An editor at Velo, a cycling publication owned by Outside Inc, has been fired for plagiarizing the work of a journalist. And that journalist isn’t just anyone, but James Huang, a respected longtime writer who was forced out shortly after Outside acquired both what was then called Velo News, and Cycling Tips, where Huang used to work. This is both notable as a step in Outside’s slow destruction, and a completely unsurprising story here at the end of 2025, a year in which legacy media has become little more than a punchline in a bad joke about the state of the world.

James, writing on his Substack, N-1: “State Bicycle Company isn’t one to wow potential customers with cutting-edge technology and marginal gains…Instead its playbook combines long-proven construction and materials with exceptionally high value.”

Velo: “State Bicycle Company isn’t one to wow potential customers with gimmicks. Instead, its playbook combines long-proven construction methods and materials with surprisingly high value and looks that make the bike feel more expense than it is.”

There’s more, but you get the idea. It’s unclear if Alvin Holbrook, the editor whose byline appeared on the Velo story directly copy and pasted passages from James’ work, or if the results were created by AI, or through some other source.

In a post acknowledging the instance of plagiarism, Velo’s editor-in-chief writes: “We recently confirmed that several stories published on our site failed to meet our editorial standards for originality, which state that plagiarism in any form is unacceptable. As a result of our internal investigation, the employee responsible for this breach is no longer employed by Velo.”

This is as clearcut as any instance of plagiarism could possibly be. But the line between quality, original content and its derivative isn’t always so stark, and remains just as important both to the cause of journalism, and for you, its reader no matter how gray it gets. Because I’m a also a journalist who has been prolifically plagiarized and one who was fired by Outside for being too good at my job, this seems like a perfect opportunity to address the topic of plagiarism in general.

Way back in 2007 I took advantage of the massive traffic and meager wage paid by my day job working as Jalopnik’s first road test editor to launch an independent motorcycle blog. It was an uphill battle from the beginning. Not only was that industry entirely unaware of the existence of the Internet, but covering it relied on access, and that was something it jealously guarded against outsiders like me. But like James and other journalists with staying power, I’m stubborn. I beat down the industry’s blockade with a steady stream of exclusive information and images about new bikes before you were supposed to see them, genuinely insightful interviews with designers and CEOs, and coverage of motorcycle culture that was actually meaningful.

Much to that world’s chagrin, Hell For Leather quickly became the only motorcycle publication that mattered. Something I feel was acknowledged by the rampant plagiarism.

Writing in Motorcyclist—which at the time it went out-of-print in 2019 was the longest continually-published motorcycle magazine in America—Aaron Frank copied and pasted text from one of my stories, without attribution. The magazine never acknowledged this mistake.

But one of the points I’m trying to make here is that while plagiarism is most commonly thought of in terms of Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V, it’s more often something much harder to define.

A Google search tells me, without a need to visit Merriam-Webster’s site, that the dictionary defines plagiarize as, “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source.” See how I told you where I got that quote, and linked to it? It’s ok to base a part of your work on others, in fact it’s impossible not to. But you can’t just steal someone else’s ideas and words without attribution.

This quickly becomes convoluted in the context of journalism, because the act of performing that often involves covering work and ideas created by other people. When a friend at a motorcycle company would share secret details on a new superbike with me, I knew I was the only journalist publishing its horsepower figure before anyone else knew it. When I cracked the passwords of the servers used by a manufacturer, and obtained images of a new motorcycle before it’d been unveiled, I knew I was the only one with those images. And yet, that number and that photo would appear across dozens of other websites and magazines, almost always presented as their own original scoop. The words and ideas weren’t mine, but they came from my work.

I actually went so far as to embed hidden watermarks in images and to slightly alter those horsepower numbers in an effort to catch those imitators. In Europe, power numbers are listed in pferdestärke, which when converted to American horsepower often results in a decimal. Doing the conversion only produces a single result, but I’d change that from a .6 to a .7 or whatever, and would then see multiple publications, even some very large ones like Autoblog, reprinting that deliberate mistake, again without attribution. Again often with images I’d been first to put on the Internet.

As that example with Motorcyclist illustrates, this was happening not just at small sites, but at the same legacy titles who were working to prevent HFL’s financial success.

At the same time as I was growing more and more frustrated with the motorcycle world, others were looking at what I felt was limited success with envy. A fan named Jensen Beeler emailed one day to invite me out for a beer, and ended up picking my brain about what it takes to launch a successful website over kielbasa at the Gowanus Yacht Club. He would then go on to launch Asphalt and Rubber, which he devoted in its entirety to ripping me off not just in the ways detailed above, but in his writing style, story selection, and just in every way possible. I kept trying to tell myself that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, but why did it have to be such a bad imitation?

Is any of that plagiarism? I’ll leave that as an open question. One thing I think we can all agree on is that it’s a problem. For me, trying to scrape by an independent journalist, it was a problem because it became one of many barriers to success. For you, the reader, it became a problem because if you weren’t a super engaged consumer of motorcycle content, you were left not knowing where to turn for good information. That may seem fairly unimportant if we’re only considering this in terms of 145.6 versus 145.7 horsepower, but it might have been life-or-death if you were shopping for a new helmet for your kid, came across one of my articles illustrating the reasons why one safety standard was flawed versus another, and weren’t able to tell if that was from a trustworthy source or not, given the overwhelming presence of content imitating my own across the Internet.

And it’s a problem for another important participant in media too. The success of advertising isn’t commonly included in talk of editorial standards in media, but the existence of quality, objective, important content is critical in the ability for a brand to reach an audience with its message. Given the pervasive nature of other people in the motorcycle world ripping me off, advertisers were left behind the curve, writing checks to publications that no longer mattered to readers, or like Asphalt and Rubber, which had never mattered at all. Without a demonstrable return, they reigned in their spending.

I eventually sold Hell For Leather for equity in a new lead generation portal I helped create. RideApart ended up failing because it was undercapitalized, and the relentless pressure to deliver traffic on less than a shoestring in order to support that business model resulted in transparently terrible content that mattered to no one. Traffic, without engagement, is nothing.

This is where we bring things back to Outside Inc. How did plagiarism come to a once legendary publication?

I explained a lot of this in the piece I wrote about getting fired from the company in retribution for being too good at covering the ongoing attempt by Republican politicians to steal public lands from the American people, and give places like our national parks to billionaires. But the gist is Outside Magazine was acquired by a Sequoia Capital-backed financial vehicle that promptly changed its name to Outside Inc, and along the way also sucked up most of the important publications in the outdoor space that aren’t owned by GearJunkie.

In the process of blowing nearly $200 million of Sequoia’s money failing to create a new business model, CEO Robin Thurston dismantled the editorial teams that had made publications like Cycling Tips important to their readers, and replaced them with inexperienced staff operating with virtually no budgets. What few friends and former colleagues who are still hanging on to their jobs are being asked to do is impossible, working without support from management, even as the company expends resources hunting down talk or action that may be viewed as disloyal. The company has quietly been seeking a buyer for the best part of the last year, but initial talk of a $500 million price tag has been laughed out of every board room it was brought into.

Working in that miserable environment inevitably leads to poor decision making. New hires are vetted primarily for a willingness to churn out garbage for as little money as possible, rather than their talent, drive, or experience. Stories are edited not by teams, but typically by a single overworked, underpaid editor struggling even to apply basic literacy to the articles that fly across their desks. It’s not a surprise that this resulted in an example of copy/pasting, it is surprising it took this long to happen.

At the same time, that same question of what defines actual plagiarism remains open. We can all agree that it was plagiarism when Alvin directly stole James’s words, but is it also plagiarism when one of my former editors tasked with providing public lands coverage following my departure texts me to ask for my contacts in that world? Is it plagiarism when they chase the original content I produce here on this Substack with derivative work that doesn’t acknowledge they read it here first? Is it plagiarism when a young writer, paid a fraction of what I once was, is asked to replicate my reporting on a subject I had to spend years bullying the publication to accept as part of its purview?

Outside Inc has chosen to longer be a home to the kind of content created by James, and the dozens of our fellow journalists who have been laid off, fired, or like him, who left in solidarity because the loss of those colleagues made doing our job difficult to impossible. That’s a problem for the journalists, because there’s no longer a parent company paying our bills, and creating journalism independently is always going to involve struggle. It’s a problem for readers because they no longer have a handful of prominent titles to turn to for quality content they can trust. And it’s a problem for advertisers because they can no longer trust Outside to deliver their message to an engaged audience.

The motorcycle world began to fail at about the same time my motorcycle site did. Since that time sales have fallen year over year as boomers, the last generation to care about motorcycles, have aged out of riding. Without a single quality media outlet, that industry has no way to speak to a new audience. It’s my sincere hope that Outside’s collapse doesn’t preview something similar happening to the outdoors, but retailers and brands in the outdoor rec space are already starting too fail, something Outside has yet to cover.

I realize this is going to come across as sour grapes from a former employee. I’m not sure there’s a way to talk about this without sounding like that. But because there is no obvious solution to the mess I’m describing here, I feel strongly that this must be a conversation all of us invested in media must have. Plagiarism is both a cause and symptom of media’s existential struggle. And addressing it isn’t as simple as printing a half-assed apology.

Top photo: NOAA

Upgrading to a paid subscription is an investment in the future of independent reporting on public lands and the outdoors. Doing so enables journalism like this to remain free, so that it can change the most minds possible. It also buys personal access to Wes, who will use his experience and his extensive network of subject matter experts to guide your gear purchases, help plan your trips, and save you money. You can read more about what Wes is doing on Substack at this link.