Outside Just Fired Me Because Of My Politics

I'm hardly Jimmy Kimmel, but that's also a reason this should worry you

No, it’s not because I said something about Charlie Kirk. But Outside Magazine, where I’ve worked for the last decade as the outdoor lifestyle columnist, just fired me because of my politics. Here’s how it went down, and why it’s a concerning indication both for the future of that publication, and the wider media world.

Last Thursday, I announced that I’m running for Montana State Senate. Doing that feels like a logical next step after writing about the intersection of politics and the outdoors for 10 years now. I’d notified my editors at Outside about the decision to run for elected office four months ago. But on Friday, they called to inform me that the publication’s “editorial standards” policy prohibits politicians from writing for the outlet, and that my contract was therefore terminated, effective immediately. Let me describe my history with the publication, and I think it will become obvious that my campaign is little more than an excuse for Outside to advance its adoption of far-right political thinking, at the expense of reason.

Over a decade of employment, this is the first time I’ve even heard of any sort of “editorial standards” policy from Outside, and no such document is available online. Such a policy has never come up, not even on the multiple occasions when I’ve been asked to make changes to editorial content to please advertisers, not when the ad sales department has directly performed edits to my articles, not when I was told the only path to publishing an interview I drove all the way out to Minnesota to do with Tim Walz last October was to turn that into a “travel” story, and not when, last week, an explanation that fuel economy standards for automakers had been rolled back by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was removed from an article about fuel economy because leaving that in would have angered Outside Inc's CEO.

My role at Outside formally started in January, 2016, but by this time ten years ago we were already negotiating terms, as the publication sought to hire me away from Gawker Media. I think it was that October when I first flew out to meet with the editorial team, after signing the contract.

During that meeting, then editor-in-chief Chris Keyes asked me to pitch some ideas that might merit an investment in the process of longform investigation. I responded immediately with the Republicans’ growing attempts to steal public lands from Americans. I wanted to illustrate the connection between oil and gas campaign money and the bills being introduced by rightwing politicians. After the kind of lively debate that’s necessary to the healthy function of any editorial team, all of us came to the amicable conclusion that Hillary Clinton would likely win the 2016 election, and that when that happened, Republicans would be unable to make progress on their plan. Simpler times, right? As a consolation prize, Chris told me that I was free to report out any news around the great public lands heist, and we could make the decision to dive in more deeply if it became a matter of greater concern.

And we got started on that almost immediately. The first article I can find on that topic is from June of 2016. We never did take the time to put together a larger investigation, mostly just because news around the effort to steal our public lands started to come in hot and heavy, and reporting it, analyzing it, and working to stop it from happening began to take up a huge amount of our time.

I was hired by Outside to help make its coverage of the outdoor recreation space relevant to the wider world, and to bring an Internet-first perspective and pace to the publication. We did that by looking at hitherto untouched topics through the lens of the outdoors. I was the first contributor to seriously set out to cover vehicles, for instance, dove deep into the world of dog ownership, brought realistic talk of animal conservation to the publication, and expanded its coverage of cooking into something that began to deliver serious traffic. Politics, especially because it was being used to threaten the very outdoors in which Outside’s readers recreate, felt like a natural part of that purview. I think anyone involved agreed.

There was, of course, the kind of give and take that makes any editorial team healthy. Feedback from management, senior editorial staff, and the editors I worked with day-to-day helped me ask better questions, and improved the quality of my work. I don’t think anyone at Outside ever once told me “no.” Most often, they were cheering me on.

Together, we helped hold then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke accountable for his rampant corruption, forcing the politician responsible for the largest reduction in public land protections in American history out of office. When Jason Chaffetz—a Utah Congressperson who retired soon after—introduced a bill to sell off 3.3 million acres of public land, we helped stop him. During the protracted government shutdown that spanned late 2018 and early 2019, we were first to report that leaving national parks open without adequate staffing was killing visitors. I was able to openly criticize automakers and other companies responsible for lying to the American public, not just without pushback, but with the encouragement of the entire team, no matter if the brand in question advertised with us or not.

During that time, I remember one of my editors proudly telling me, “Wes, this is the stuff that Congressional hearings are made out of.” Stories I wrote almost always accumulated hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes millions.

Then came the pandemic. Virginia, the dogs, and I drove back from our wedding in Baja Sur to find not just barren shelves at the grocery store, but the editorial team at Outside depleted by layoffs. I threw myself into the act of delivering for our now much smaller team, an effort that resulted in what I believe was the highest traffic to our website ever. Focussing on that didn’t just give me something positive to work on during that very dark time, it also saw me doing everything in my power to deliver for our team, hopefully saving as many of my colleagues’ jobs as possible.

Outside was never going to make me rich. If I’d cared about that I’d have left way before now. I stayed because I believe in the cause of journalism—speaking truth to power—and because Outside gave me a home in which I could perform that work to the best of my ability, with the full support of other talented, passionate people who cared as much as I do about the outdoors.

In early 2021, Outside’s founder, Larry Burke, sold the company to a financial vehicle funded by Sequoia Capital, which promptly changed its name to Outside Inc. That company was in the process of buying up every property in the outdoor space it could. Change started to come immediately.

I remember copy/pasting a conversation I had with the Secretary of the Interior about one of our stories into the editorial team’s Slack channel, so they could share in that bizarre moment with me. My editor DM’d me immediately telling me to delete it, and warned, “HR is watching.”

Soon after, I was informed that my permalance contract would need to go full-time, if I hoped to keep contributing. I didn’t feel it was ethical to agree to that, since I was earning more money by writing and consulting outside of Outside than I was within it. A long conversation with Chris, the editor-in-chief, resulted in a statement that the company was committed to retaining me, and a promise to work with Sequoia’s lawyers to find a carve out that would allow me to stay involved. He followed through on that.

Around that same time, I started to receive more pushback on some of the conclusions in my articles. Especially those around vehicles. For those of you not familiar, I’ve worked in the automotive space at a high level since I was 21, and am probably the most experienced journalist covering the use of vehicles for supporting camping and other outdoor activities. Because of that, I consider providing consumers good guidance around vehicle and accessory shopping an almost-sacred duty. But Outside Inc’s new ad sales department apparently didn’t agree, and was worried that by recommending one 4x4, or type of tire or whatever, over another, I could potentially cost them sales. Having owned a couple of media businesses, I was sympathetic to that concern, and offered to address it by setting up meetings with my friends in the C-suites at the companies they were courting as clients. The offer was rebuffed, not due to “editorial standards,” but, as I understand it, because they didn’t want to have to cut me in on a sale.

Outside Inc. set out to apply a new business model not just to Outside, but across the entirety of the outdoor recreation space that they’d just acquired. The idea wasn’t just that your $100/year would buy you unfettered access to the content being created by me and other people, but that same payment would cover your navigation app, your race entry fees if that kind of hobby is your thing, as well as discounts on gear, lift tickets, lodging etc. My understanding is that the ultimate plan was a big data play. So they could bring all the above together in personalized recommendations based on content, followed up with discounts to drive urgency. That never happened.

Almost immediately, Outside Inc. broke the sites of flagship titles like Outside, Backpacker, and Climbing, as they sought to combine them into one platform. That was followed by the implementation of a non-metered paywall, in which only subscribers could see any content. In the most predictable turn of events ever, traffic cratered. It has not recovered.

With nearly $200 million in investment, Outside Inc. needed to deliver results that a stillborn, but still-in-place subscription model and broken websites could not. Rather than reinvesting in editorial, the thing it was asking people to pay for, it instead opted for a Hail Mary: a new tech platform that would amplify discoverability and community between users.

To quote one of my former editors, “they bet the house.” It did not pay off. Not only is the “platform” simply a re-skinned version of the old website with a truly terrible user interface, but it completely destroys the experience once you’ve clicked beyond the article that brought you in. No one interacts with the homepage anymore, since that’s now hidden behind a further need to click, after you’ve been turned off by how bad the site looks.

A few months ago I showed the Outside site to a billionaire tech investor during any unrelated meeting, just because he was curious. His response: “What the fuck?!”

All of that has played out over the the last four years. In that time, investments in content have disappeared—my web show was cancelled, requested pitches for a TV show went nowhere—and earlier this year nearly the entire editorial staff was laid off. A full-time team that once numbered in the 30s totaled five people the last time I checked. Around that same time, Outside cut all if its columnists except me, but my contract was reduced to a mere fraction of what it once was.

Throughout all of that, a culture of curiosity, ethical behavior, and ambition has been replaced by one of fear, and also one that’s totally cut out coverage of one side of political thought, while amplifying the other.

That suppression of political content slowly came to a head last summer. I was still proceeding as normal, under the assumption that the relationship I had with my editors remained the same, and that all of us were aligned with the side of the American people. Then I wrote a story about Project 2025’s plan to privatize the weather forecasts, and was met with a huge amount of pushback.

“Is weather really something that’s relevant to Outside’s readers?

“There’s no chance this actually happens.”

“This will offend people.”

I’d never faced anything like that before at Outside. We published a neutered version of the piece, but the problem got worse. When Utah launched a lawsuit to take over all 18.5 million acres of BLM land within its borders, complete with a multi-million dollar disinformation campaign, I wrote a piece fact checking their claims.

“This piece is weird,” said one editor I’d never worked with before.

“We can only cover public lands where it relates to recreational access,” another told me. I ended up making the article about a mountain biking trail.

Another article about the Republican majority on the Supreme Court soliciting cases that would allow them to rule the Antiquities Act unconstitutional was met with a response rejecting the idea that the court was an inherently political body.

And it wasn’t just politics. An article I wrote about the launch of Scout Motors—a VW subsidiary using the name of an old American brand to sell EVs coming in 2027—became internally controversial when I included a brief history of the nameplate, and mentioned that 1950s-era Jeeps hadn’t included fixed roofs. Could that cost Outside Inc. hypothetical Jeep advertising? The answer was better safe than sorry. Yes, that is as ridiculous as it sounds.

Throughout all of this, it was the reader that suffered. I was no longer able to honestly or accurately convey to you the ways in which politics were failing. Heck, I wasn’t even able to factually describe the origins of a car brand. And when I tried to understand the reasons for this through conversations with the editorial team, the non-answers were couched in fear.

Finally, when that interview with Tim Walz brought things to a head, I got something approaching an answer:

“If you want to keep your job, you can’t say anything negative about any politician, or any brand. No shade, of any kind.” Apparently all of this was coming directly from the CEO, Robin Thurston, who was worried coverage of politics might be what was preventing Republican-leaning readers from subscribing to his failed model.

The New Yorker wrote a story about all that.

This was wild, amounting to a request for me to stop performing impartial journalism. I probably should have quit then. When my contract was reduced a couple months later, I was also banned from covering anything even remotely related to politics at the same time. I should have quit then too.

Why didn’t I? Honestly, I think it was more to do with comfort than anything else. Over the last decade, “Wes from Outside,” has become as much an identity as it was a job. I’d envisioned a future where I'd moved on to more profitable work, but kept contributing to Outside in some fashion, just because I really enjoyed doing it, and have always considered it meaningful. I guess that was a pipe dream.

After I was prevented from writing about politics, Republican politicians made their most sincere effort at selling off public lands yet. Throughout that, I provided coverage here on this newsletter that eclipsed the reporting of any other outlet. Outside itself was eventually forced to acknowledge this was happening, but as my colleagues reported those stories, they cited any source but me. Apparently even mentioning my political coverage had become a bridge too far, again because the entire team was operating in fear of the CEO.

Then, in May, Outside commissioned a profile of Ryan Zinke. Now a congressperson, the interior secretary we’d gotten fired for trying to destroy public lands was trying to repair that image by trying to claim credit for efforts to save those lands. That was laughable, but Outside commissioned a journalist with no experience covering politics to write a puff piece, and that’s what they did. The piece also avoided linking to or referencing any of my previous work covering Zinke’s overwhelmingly corrupt history. Outside’s transformation into a mouthpiece for the regime was complete.

We’re witnessing something similar pretty much everywhere right now. The Washington Post was purchased by Jeff Bezos, who has cracked down on the editorial department’s ability to talk about the corrupting influence billionaires have on our society. The administration itself is suing anyone you’ve ever heard of over simple negative coverage. And, of course, whichever corporate conglomerate owned whichever channel Jimmy Kimmel appeared on just fired him, after the director of the FCC said something about sleeping with the fishes. I fear this is the end of the media continuum as we’ve understood it for over the last century. Something new will emerge and must emerge from its ashes. Does that look like a bunch of independent newsletters published on a platform also controlled by billionaires? Will it happen in time to help save this country from this desperately stupid attempt at autocratic takeover? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does.

What about me? This is all a lot to process, but I’ll be fine. It certainly won’t deter me from the project of trying to fix American politics by joining the Montana State Senate—a role which, if I’m successful in November 2026, will pay me a grand total of $11,599.20 in 2027. Nor has any of this stopped me from writing about politics, I just do that here on this newsletter now. If anything, it’s encouraging me to redouble my efforts in both endeavors. If you’d like to help me along in that campaign, you can donate on its website. If you value my journalism, that exists here now, and you can support it by upgrading to a paid subscription.

But I do enjoy working on larger things, with teams of intelligent people. If you’re planning something ambitious and creative around any of the worlds I touch, and think I might be able to add value to it, please reach out. I’m not easy to work with, but I am the best at what I do, whatever that is.

Top photo: Matthew Griffin. That’s my old business card soaked in the blood of an elk. Seemed fitting.

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.