Mark Bryant was Outside’s editor-in-chief in the nineties, years that seem golden mostly in retrospect. “The business was hard, the work was hard, but it was more straightforward,” Bryant told me. “We could focus on the business at hand, putting out a great magazine for readers, and not, you know, content bundling and data aggregation.” Baby boomers were discovering an apparently bottomless appetite for outdoor sports and adventure travel. The magazine benefitted from this surge in interest, even as some writers expressed misgivings about it. The article that became “Into Thin Air” was an example of this ambivalence. Bryant assigned Jon Krakauer to cover the rapid commercialization of Mt. Everest expeditions, sending him on a trip led by a guide who had agreed to accept the bulk of his fee in the form of future advertising in the magazine. That guide, Rob Hall, ended up dying on the mountain, along with seven other people. Krakauer, traumatized and exhausted, wrote a seventeen-thousand-word article within weeks. The story was memorably clear on the dangers that accompanied the increasing numbers of amateurs on Mt. Everest; the next year, demand for guided trips was higher than ever.
Burke, the owner, was often a source of friction. According to former staffers, he was critical of hippies, dirtbag climbers, environmentalists, and stories about animals. But he was also immensely proud of the magazine. During the nineties, the famously stingy Burke rewarded star writers and editors with all-expenses-paid kayaking trips on the Salmon River.
Through the years, Burke received multiple offers to sell Outside, but he was always resistant, even as the rise of the internet began to erode circulation and advertising income. At first, the larger audiences available online, especially through social media, made the trade-offs seem worthwhile. “We in the outdoor media—and the media, generally—were kind of selling our souls to the platforms for the distribution, because it was so easy and so cheap,” Christopher Jerard, an original staff member of Freeskier magazine and the current vice-president of marketing at Outside, Inc., said. “Then—surprise, surprise—they turned the spigot off, and we were left with no owned audiences.” By 2020, a person familiar with Outside’s editorial mission estimated, the print edition of the magazine had roughly half as many pages as a few decades earlier; Burke, nearing his eighties, finally decided to sell.