Straights & Curves: Fan Service
5 stories to start your week. Plus some commentary.
Hi there, welcome back to Breakfast Club, a newsletter for thoughtful movers. My name is Sam Robinson, a former historian-turned-tech-worker who writes about life in motion and the ideas that shape our movement through the world.
Here are 5 stories to start your week, with a bit of commentary about challenging our preconceived notions.
Don’t be of service
A couple weeks ago, Zoë Rom published a thoughtful op-ed in Outside Online about the risks of fan service in endurance media. It’s well written and I recommend it, especially if you’re interested in media coverage of endurance sport. Read it here.
Rom, editor-in-chief at Trailrunner Magazine, highlights the risks of writing in service to an audience. While she’s enthusiastic about the “democratization” of sport media—specifically new podcasts, blogs, and newsletters—she cautions these creators tend to play to the crowd.
Niche outlets are prone to “fan service,” writing to please existing fans or cater to their desires:
“Podcasts will be incentivized to platform guests who can further grow their audience rather than voices with the best story to tell. Newsletters will be incentivized not to challenge their subscriber base, but to increase their output and push more and more and more of the same content their fans know and love. Creators will be increasingly hesitant to alienate their base, placing the primacy of creation on ‘what people want.’”
We risk, argues Rom, traveling the same road as cable news, becoming echo chambers that say only what our audience wants to hear, rather than uncomfortable truths.
“We can all start by investigating our own preferences and desires,” she concludes, “supporting voices that challenge our preconceived beliefs and ideas.”
To my mind, this is exactly right. Newsletters, including this one, are usually shoe-string affairs, typically independent labors of love. So I take Rom’s argument against fan service seriously. When faced with voices and ideas with which I disagree, I’ve certainly fallen short numerous times. We need nuanced journalism and writing to articulate and provoke deeper and richer understandings of the world.
What perplexes me though is Rom’s situational perspective as an editor of Trailrunner, an outlet I would describe as itself “service journalism,” printing practical information, advice, and stories to help readers navigate a particular life interest. Under the banner of RUN, a new masthead for running coverage for Outside Inc., most of the magazine’s coverage tends toward coaching-lite tips/tricks, alongside gear reviews, and human-interest stories.
That said, in recent years semi-legacy media like Outside, Trail Runner, Women’s Running, and Runner’s World have published pieces that foray into the political, often with a focus on diversity and inclusion, alongside topical coverage of climate change. But I’m not convinced that these stories are doing what Rom may think they are doing when she compares them to the work of independent content creators.
Consider Trail Runner’s audience. Most, although certainly not all, are college-educated with enough leisure time and disposable income for a fun hobby like trail running. Running in the woods is not as pricey as a sport like sailing, but it does require trail access, which in the United States generally means owning a car. Proximity to a trail network means you live in an area where people prioritize that kind of space. And you can probably connect the dots about the political and philosophical leanings of those places.
So if I were to speculate, I’d imagine the average Outside/Trailrunner reader is more likely to be an Elizabeth Warren supporter than a Ron DeSantis supporter. And then how challenged will someone of that cohort be reading stories about the need for more equity in sport? Or efforts to enhance the visibility of Black runners or women coaches or indigenous people or non-binary people? Would they be uncomfortable reading stories about centering climate change in endurance-sport coverage (like this, this, this, or this)?
My hunch is no. They would not.
I don’t disagree with the stories above. The issue is I do agree with them. “Sure,” I think when I encounter such stories. “Sounds great! Elevate more people!”
But are these stories real provocations? Maybe, but I’m not convinced. Deep writing punctures the superficiality of reader interest and avoids simplifying complex, ambiguous human reality within preconceived intellectual consensus.
Ideally, an endurance-sport media outlet with the resources of an editorial staff would create spaces for debate and reframing of hot topics. For example, coverage of non-binary folks in sport could discuss the trade-offs of trans-athlete inclusion in endurance sport with disagreeing perspectives. This happens in other forums. Conversations like this episode of Left, Right, and Center, made me think deeply about my stance on the transgender-athlete debate.
And if you want to provoke thought about climate change among trail runners, try featuring someone who thinks shale gas extraction between 2000 and 2020 provided low-cost energy market conditions that facilitated affordable production of plastic trail-running shoes, making the sport more accessible. I’d probably disagree with those viewpoints, but my preconceived notions would be challenged.
Could running outlets air these types of stories, writing that would likely make its readers and even its own staff uncomfortable? I think it would be helpful and hope their editors can be agents of such change!
But I worry that brands like Runner’s World, Trailrunner, iRunFar, Outside, and others are themselves too niche. They’re chained in service to a slice of subscribers and advertisers who may be alienated by coverage that steers too far from their expectations or political comfort zone.
No one at the marketing departments of Brooks, Hoka, or Tracksmith will be flustered in slightest by another article about the need to center diverse voices in running. These stories are fundamentally unthreatening to capital. But write about the working conditions of the exploited people in Asia, many coerced into forced-labor factories, who stitch together these brands’ spiffy shoes, and they might reconsider their support. And yet that’s the sort of coverage we need.
Ultimately, my critique of these media outlets’ attempts at political or cultural commentary is not that they are of poor quality. Far from it. But when they try to push a debate forward, they are usually not speaking truth to power. They’re just shaping consumer preferences.
And that’s not challenging in the least.
Quick splits
Olympic Trials DFLs. A delightful deep dive into an unheralded honor: finishing Dead-F*cking Last at the Olympic Marathon Trials. Only 26 people are members of this exclusive club. These are their stories. (Defector)
Are cold plunges good for you? Advocates say it combats depression, boosts immunity, and feels like doing a line of coke without the side effects. (KQED)
Gonzo journalism at Millrose Games. “We stand for a beautiful rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. No instruments. Not a cell phone in sight. Hands on our hearts, we’re all patriots. It’s a bit redundant, or unnecessary, considering the facility might be the most distinctly American creation I have ever laid eyes on.” (LetsRun)
Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream. Hat tip to Mario Fraioli for sharing this wonderful video about Casey Neistat’s attempt to break 3 hours in the marathon. Inspirational link of the week. (YouTube)
Weekly run
Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with some hills
For updates, email Katie Klymko at katieklymko at gmail.com to join Breakfast Club’s WhatsApp chat. More info
For more local events, join our Strava club, East Bay Strava Runners
Tweets of the week
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! You can follow me on Notes, Strava, and what’s left of Twitter.
...i shudder at what we become when everyone is a content creator...1 in 2 children want that as their career "when they grow up"...what will the new AI algorithm dictate they make?...we are missing the tools in new media to make = new media and unfortunately new media tools just make iterations of old media...and thence you get the pods you/I protest...minds are fragile...expression is concrete...whence can we sugar the cookies...
Really thoughtful post, Sam. I've been tossing around Rom's column in my head for several days as well, and I'm kinda not sure what to think. I get what she's saying about fan service, but there's a positive way and a negative way to look at that. (Ultimately, a publication -- especially an "enthusiast"-style publication like Trail Runner or Runner's World -- has to be "for" someone, or some group of people. I'm not sure how you get around that essential need for a publication to exist.
In the running enthusiast space, there's really only two publishing operations left with the organizational muscle -- and money to defend against lawsuits, were it to come to that -- to write the kinds of stories you're describing, and that's the publications under the Outside umbrella and Hearst, which of course owns Runner's World. In today's media landscape, I'm just not sure who else can take stories like those on. It would be encouraging to see Rom pushing for change inside the one of those two that she works for, and maybe opening up and telling us about the challenges she faces in getting those stories told.
(Still, her points are very good ones; I'm just not sure how we get from A to B on this.)