Countdown

On the future of The Outline. Our team. Our bodies. Ourselves.

6 min readNov 7, 2016

This is from Watchmen. It’s about nuclear war. We’re not doing a nuclear war for the record.

Let me preface this Personal News Medium Post by saying that I’m not really a fan of talking a lot about the things I’m working on while I am working on them. As you will note, there have been very few updates about The Outline — and this is by design. Not only have we had our heads down working on about a thousand huge and little things, but I generally think that it’s better to just let people form their own opinions once something is real. And things are going to be really real soon.

Besides, you’ve got enough noise in your feed every day.

As you may know, we think of The Outline as a new kind of publication (publication is actually the wrong word, but we don’t have a new one yet), built for the modern world from the ground up. We want to tell you the most fascinating stories about power, culture, and the future every single day — and to tell those stories in a truly different way.

As a way to test out ideas and flex new muscles, we’ve been doing some extremely cool and interesting things over the past several months. We have also been joined by some incredibly smart and talented people — and I want to take moment to call all of that out.

Also (and perhaps most importantly) The Outline is going to launch (drop? bounce? explode?) into the world very soon. I mean, in a matter of weeks. Shockingly soon. Frighteningly soon.

Too soon? Not soon enough? Who knows. But it’s definitely happening.

Don’t worry, if you signed up you’ll get even more news about it soon. Have you signed up yet? Also follow us on Twitter. And Facebook. And Instagram. We will make it worth your while.

Now on to the news.

For starters, we have a whole slew of new team members:

Christine Werthman is our Managing Editor! Christine was recently the Executive Editor of Genius, and before that a Deputy Editor at Complex and Managing Editor at XXL. Now she’s slingshotted into the Outline’s gravitational pull. She’s highly organized and super smart about music, so we have at least one thing in common.

Khalila Douze is leading our audience development and social media efforts, and will craft the voice of The Outline across the billions of channels we plan to distribute on (hello Martian XQ radio!). Khalila was previously at Genius, and before that THE FADER— so you know she has impeccable taste. She’s already crafted some of our best performing #content, with much more to come!

Sam Thonis comes to the team from Bloomberg, where he was the Global Head of Digital Video. He was previously with me at The Verge building out a groundbreaking video aesthetic (you’ve probably seen his stuff many times). He also did a brief stint at Mic.com. Along with Jordan Oplinger and Billy Disney, he’s leading our insane moving-picture efforts.

Stephen Cronin joins our dev team from First Look Media. He previously worked at Code and Theory as an ‘Associate Snack Master,’ and at the design firm HYPERHYPER. He brings an incredible combination of front-end engineering and design chops to the team. He’s also a calligrapher. Also he’s got jokes.

Dave Lucia: Dave has the smallest dog in New York, but one of the biggest brains on the planet. He helped launch and relaunch a number of properties with me at Bloomberg (so he really understands how deranged I am). Along with Ivar and Cronin, he’s making some kind of weird, impossible magic happen in his role as Senior Developer.

Owen Phillips: Owen holds the Outline record for shortest period between interview and start date. He’s joining our team as a staff writer, and will draw upon his experience as a freelance contributor to The Awl, an education news intern at NPR, and most recently a consultant who used behavioral science to help people make better life choices.

Nicole Yoko Dalessandro: Nicole joins our Revenue team from media agency MEC Global. She was an English and Studio art major at Wesleyan, and her senior thesis ‘Fatso Junior’ won the prize for most outstanding senior exhibition.

Peyton Dix is one of our new editorial interns who joins us after stints at Flavorwire.com and Paper Magazine. She graduated from Emerson College, where she doubled the audience as EIC of Your Magazine Emerson. She also has the coolest name in the world.

Emily Brown also joins us as an editorial intern. The first sentence in her cover letter was “The Digital Media landscape is deeply, deeply uncool.” Between that and her published essay on conspiracy theorist Facebook groups, we knew she was a good fit.

Tolu Edionwe is an editorial intern too (who will be flexing some dev skills as well). She’s a graduate of Grinnell College, and more recently the New York Code + Design Academy. One of her recent projects is a web app called Bound that suggests podcasts based on the length of users’ commute and their genre preference. So basically you can pretty much count on her to come up with something that changes your life.

Also, I want to highlight some of the Code and Theory family who are working as part of our dev team. Chris Baptista, Christopher Anderson, and David Whitely are making some incredible stuff alongside our in-house team. WE LOVE YOU!

A few other odds and ends.

We’ve been making things here and there, and I wanted to share a few of those with you now. These represent a bit about what’s to come from The Outline, and they‘re also just good examples of us experimenting and exploring in public — something you will see a lot of from us, both now and beyond launch.