In September, we held our fall board meeting in Boulder, Colorado. And once we were caught up on business, we got together with friends old and new to celebrate Andy Wiessner, who marks 40 years on the HCN board this year. (You’ll read more about Andy in a future “Dear Friends” column.)
We want to thank our hosts at the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder: Thomas Andrews, Tamar McKee, Brooke Neely and Ryan Lueck. Tamar, who manages programs and operations, is an anthropologist who has wandered all over the Western U.S. and Tibet; her degree in museum and field studies was shown in the incredible photos of Mexican cowboys and cowgirls that adorned the center’s walls. Brooke is a research fellow who specializes in the intersection of national parks and Indigenous nations. Ryan coordinates the center’s academic program and hails from Colorado’s Western Slope, not far from HCN’s headquarters.
We’re not entirely sure that anyone thought to check in with Thomas, the center’s director, before we invaded his office to hold a meeting with our management team. He looked a little surprised to find seven of us huddled around his conference table, guzzling coffee and chatting away on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday morning. But we couldn’t have found a more gracious host, or a better space than that high-windowed second-floor office in Boulder’s grand Macky Auditorium. Thomas, a historian, specializes in environmental, Indigenous and animal history and is currently writing a book about the Great Horse Flu of 1872-’73, which sickened more than 90% of North America’s equine population.
We were humbled by the hospitality and all the fascinating conversation, and we vowed to get together again and make good trouble at the earliest opportunity.
A marathon three years at HCN
In the fall of 2022, the High Country News management team and board of directors met in Seattle and laid the groundwork for a three-year strategic plan to rebuild HCN from the ground up. Since then, we’ve overhauled everything that makes publishing a magazine like this possible — all the sprockets and pulleys and wheels and gears that keep our journalism running.
• We developed new publishing strategies that make it easier for us to serve up timely news and analysis online while still printing blockbuster issues of the magazine 12 times a year. (Only half of what we publish appears in the print edition; log in and sign up for our email newsletter if you want to see what you’re missing!)
• We traded in the old building in Paonia, Colorado (where we still have a small office) for fresh digital infrastructure, including a new back end to our website and up-to-date software to track subscriptions, process donations, send out emails — all that behind-the-scenes stuff.
• We quit using junk mail to attract new subscribers and adopted new digital marketing strategies instead. We want to do more than just bring in new readers; we want to keep folks engaged and excited, not just with our stories but with their communities and with the region as a whole.
• And we adopted new fundraising, accounting and management strategies, revising our technology so that our staff can better focus on the work that we came here to do: telling great stories and keeping our wonderful readers informed and involved with the issues that matter.
In the process, we’ve transformed what was once a scrappy nonprofit into a more nimble and professional institution, one with the chops to navigate the stormy waters that lie ahead. With your help and encouragement, dear friends, HCN will survive and thrive — and even manage to have some fun along the way!
A challenging year ahead
High Country News is lucky: Unlike our colleagues in public media, we’ve never had to rely on government funding. You, our readers, keep us going by providing three-quarters of the revenue we need, so we can pay our staff and freelancers and publish the magazine, keeping our community fully informed about the West.
But rising costs, including double-digit increases in health-care premiums, mean we’ll have to tighten our belts for the coming year — and that, as you know, is never easy. Please keep an eye out for our year-end fundraising appeal and contribute what you can.
And don’t forget: You can always make a contribution online at hcn.org/support, or send a check to P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. (And please give what you can to those public media orgs, too! They’re really suffering right now.)
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the November 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Hosts with the most.”
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