What is The Outbound Collective?

The Outbound is your home for adventure and travel. Use our platform to share your stories and discover adventures near you and across the globe. If you want to help inspire millions of like-minded folks to get outside, explore the world, and live healthier lives, this is the place for you.

Our Community

We wouldn’t be able to do this without our community of amazing people who share their adventures and stories. Everything you see on The Outbound was created by people just like you. They love the outdoors and travel and use our platform as a place to inform, inspire, and engage with each other. Some are weekend warriors, some adventure full-time living their lives on the move, and others are just folks who want to make getting outside more of a part of their everyday lives. The thing they all have in common is they love the outdoors and travel and want to engage with others who share their passion.

Why should you write on our platform?

If you become an official Outbound Storyteller, you’ll be a guiding voice in a community of millions of enthusiasts. We also hook up our Storytellers with free gear, shout outs on social media, and connections to our leading brand partners.

By sharing your stories on our platform, you’ll reach an audience of over 5 million lovers of the outdoors and travel. With direct access to our community, you can easily and quickly grow your online following.

Writing is simple, and it's easy for people to find, follow, and enjoy your work. Your profile can serve as your own personal journal for all of your adventure and travel stories or a place to point people to to show off your work.

Share your stories on social media

We feature the stories that our audience will love. Help get your stories on our radar by sharing them with your followers, friends and family, and the internet at large. We recommend sharing it on multiple times throughout the week on three or more platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Email, etc.). Your mom might be keeping daily tabs on your Facebook, but if you only post once, most of your friends won’t get the chance to see it.

Sharing across three or more platforms throughout the week will result in even more people seeing your work and you’ll play a vital role in building our community by helping everyone on The Outbound grow their audience. Win-win. Besides, you’re doing some pretty cool stuff, right? Show your friends what you’ve been up to!

If we see you’ve shared your story and people love it, we’ll be more likely to feature it in the Journal and share it ourselves.

Style Guide (suggested formatting) 

Lists

• If your story has a numbered list (like this), please use “Heading 2” under the “Format” option in the toolbar for each item on the list and number each item with the number followed by a period and a single space (ex. 1. Get started early, not 1) or 1.)).

• If your story is a list of adventures on The Outbound, link the title and the photo to the adventure (like this).

Videos

• If you’ve submitted a video, please upload a still image from the video as the cover image for your story. Please include at a couple sentences describing the content of the video.

Photos

• To add a photo into the body of a story, place your cursor where you’d like the photo to be and click the “Image” icon in the toolbar. When you upload an image it will be inserted where you placed your cursor.

Links

• Please select “Open link in a new tab” when you add a link to words or photos in your story.

Photo attribution

• Photo credit should be italicized and located immediately beneath any photos that you did not take yourself (Photo: John Appleseed). Please link photo credit to the photographer’s profile on The Outbound (we prefer photographers have a profile on The Outbound). Please credit your photos as well if you’re using a mix of yours and other photographers’ work. Credit for cover photo should be italicized and placed at the bottom of the article. If you took all the photos in your article, there is no need to include photo credit anywhere in the story.

It’s important that you do your best to use proper grammar when writing your stories and adventures. We abide by the rules of the English language (unless otherwise noted, i.e. quoting something in French), as well as AP Style.

Standard AP Style rules are as follows:

Titles:

• All movies, books, TV shows, albums, songs, podcasts and plays are to be written in quotation marks.

• “Brothers Karamazov”

• “The Sopranos”

• Do not use italics or quotation marks when citing newspapers, magazines, websites, social media, and applications. They should be written out: Rolling Stone Magazine, Buzzfeed.com, Instagram, Snapchat.

Numbers:

• Write out numbers if they are less than 10 (zero through nine) and write them numerically if they are nine or above (10 and larger).

• For ordinal numbers, follow the same rules: first, second, third; 10th day of the month, 21st birthday.

• Always write out ages numerically: 8 years old; 15 years old; 23 years old; etc.

• Hyphens are used when the age is describing a noun (person, place or thing): the 23-year-old photographer; the 100-year-old tree; etc.

• Write out fractions when they are less than one: three-fifths; two-thirds; etc.

• For numbers larger than one, use decimals: 2.5 bedrooms; 3.5 days.

• Always write weights numerically and write the unit out as well: 360 pounds; 9 ounces; etc.

• Always write inches, feet and miles numerically: 8 feet, 2 inches, 10 miles.

• Always write out speeds numerically: 35 mph. Use “mph” for miles per hour.

• Always write percentages numerically, and write the word “percent” rather than using the symbol: 5 percent; 30 percent; etc.

• Always write dollar amounts numerically with the symbol preceding the number: $50, $2 million, $6,000, etc.

• Always spell out millions, billions, trillions, and the number is always written numerically: $2 million, $15 billion, $35 trillion, etc.

• Write times numerically as follows: a.m. and p.m.

• Write years out numerically: 2016, 1980, etc.

• Do not use apostrophe ‘s’ when describing the decade: the 1970s, the 2000s.

• Use an apostrophe before the year when shortening decades: the ‘60s, the ‘90s, etc.

Locations:

• Cities and states are always written out fully in the body of the article: Los Angeles, California; New York, New York; Knoxville, Tennessee. Do not abbreviate.

• Only capitalize “national park(s)” when referring to a specific park.

• Example: “Is there a national park in Idaho?” and “Yellowstone National Park is one of my favorites.”

Words (written as pictured):

• ZIP code

• toward (not towards)

• theater, unless it is spelled “theatre” in the name/title of something

• No. 1, No. 2, No. 10 -- indicates position, jersey number or rank

• Always write website in all lowercase as shown, unless at the start of the sentence.

• OK is written in all capitals always.

• email is written as “email” with no dash.

• aka is written as shown with no periods between letters, and written as all lowercase.

• For ex. Grant Nyquist, aka G2, was running this morning.

• etc. is written as shown.

• For ex. The group packed a tent, sleeping bags, a camp stove, etc. The essentials for their camping trip.

Punctuation:

• Always place punctuation inside the quotes: “I really loved watching the movie ‘Point Break.’”

• Use single quotes around books, movies, TV shows, podcast, etc. when they’re mentioned within a quote,

• Example: When I heard my friend say, “I just started reading ‘Into Thin Air’ and am really enjoying it,” I recalled when I read it a few years ago.

• When using a dash ( - ) to indicate an inner thought within the sentence, add an em dash by clicking shift+option+dash (on a Mac) at the same time or make the single dash a double dash ( -- ).

Brands:

• Double check that all brands appear exactly as the brand has them written on their website (AP Style is a good reference for this, too): Instagram, Facebook, Garmin, REI, Backcountry, Chaco, etc.