THE LESSON HERE? It's pretty easy to determine the truth. Puff pieces are blatant. Long stories are dependable. Short bits mean well but should serve to inspire further investigation. And as I sit here sipping Jameson's, listening to my iPod, and daydreaming about the comped room I finagled at the fantastic Laluna resort, in Grenada, I assure you that writers never name-drop.

OK, so maybe once or twice, but it's pretty obvious. I can't speak to product placement at other travel magazines, but at independently owned ones like Outside, you might be surprised by the separation of church and state. During the editing of a column about searching for authentic tequila, an editor asked if I'd laud his favorite firewater—which, coincidentally, was made by the company that had sponsored his recent press trip to Mexico. Horrified, I nearly called in the editorial SWAT team at Columbia Journalism Review. Turns out there was no need; he wasn't trying to strong-arm me. What's more, my editor stood behind a sentence in the same piece that damned, with faint praise, a big advertiser—even knowing that the company might pull tens of thousands of dollars' worth of ads. (Which it did.)

So, at the risk of sounding like a suck-up, I think the editors and owner believe truth and integrity are important. Cynical reasoning says this is because it's hard to sell ads without a loyal readership, but the real reason is that magazine editors, like anybody else who takes pride in their work, really want to get it right. And when they get it wrong, you, the reader, usually let them know.

Writers, too. With a few shameful exceptions—Jayson Blair being one of the most notorious—we're a pretty trustworthy lot. OK, OK, I've kept my favorite travel spots secret and made empty promises to PR folks as I allowed them to grease the skids. The Dalai Lama and I are not on the same spiritual path. But everything that I (and most other writers I know) supposedly saw, heard, felt, tasted, smelled, said, or tickled was, to the best of my memory, actually seen, heard, felt, etc.

As for whether the tone of a story was spun in one direction or another, all a reader has to ask himself is "Does it ring true?" I'm proud to say that I think "The Single Man's Guide to Stockholm" does. Sure, my implied threesome lies by omission, but the editors, at least, must have been convinced by the rest. My long string of failures was so well chronicled, they never offered me another feature.