In the past three and a half decades, a lot of names have appeared on the High Country News masthead: three publishers, five or six chief editors, a few dozen assistant editors and staff writers and something like 200 interns and fellows. But in all that time, HCN has had only one art director. (Her original title was production manager, but the job has remained largely the same — overseeing the design and production of every issue of HCN, plus our branding and website design, and the fundraising materials, too.)
She hasn’t had much time in the spotlight — she has never asked for it. Most readers likely don’t even know who she is, though you might have met her at an HCN party or potluck, or if you dropped by the office in Paonia, Colorado, where she used to sit smiling behind a tower of outsized computer monitors. Her name is Cindy Wehling, and she’s retiring next month after a remarkable run with HCN.
Longtime colleagues describe Cindy as “stalwart,” “resilient,” “self-reliant” and “indefatigable.” While the rest of us have flowed through HCN like mountain water, she has been a polished stone, solid and steady and deeply committed to the work.
Cindy’s arrival was pure serendipity. She and her husband, Don Olsen, met in the newsroom at the Longmont Times Call, where he was the magazine editor and she was a reporter. Don’s family had deep roots in the Colorado news business. Cindy got into journalism as a high school student in Niwot, outside of Boulder, later earning a degree in magazine journalism from the storied University of Missouri J School. They tried journalism on the East Coast, “but we missed the West,” Cindy said, so they moved to Colorado’s Western Slope, where Don’s parents had a ranch.
They were both doing freelance writing, and Cindy was looking for additional work as a waitress when the job at HCN opened up. It was 1990, and the hot new thing in the news business was desktop publishing. (Previously, our newspaper production involved manually pasting up galleys of type, photos and headlines, rolling them tightly onto flats — and keeping your fingers crossed something didn’t fall off en route to the printer, many miles away. The newfangled publishing software took a huge amount of hassle out of the process.) “We were probably the only two people in the county who knew what desktop publishing was,” Cindy said.
They both applied. Cindy still gets a gleam in her eye when she remembers beating Don out for the job — she credits her darkroom skills — although it wasn’t exactly glamorous. The cramped office was in a remodeled Seventh Day Adventist church on Paonia’s main drag, with the production room tacked onto the barely insulated back porch.
“That was kind of primitive and hard,” remembered Betsy Marston, the editor who hired Cindy. Betsy and her husband, Ed, the publisher, had moved HCN to Paonia from its birthplace in Lander, Wyoming, seven years earlier and were still building the business, which wasn’t exactly rolling in dough, or subscribers.
In the years that followed, HCN moved into a much more hospitable office across the street. Cindy set up shop in a side room that was as hallowed and quiet as a library. “Those days are near and dear to my heart,” she said, “when HCN was a scrappy little newspaper, everybody working together toward a common goal, Ed Marston sweeping up trash in the common room, everybody helping to get mail bags (full of the most recent issue) into the truck.”
Over the decades, Cindy brought the work of hundreds of photographers and artists into the pages of HCN. She saw the organization through many iterations of computer software and hardware, the transformation of the black-and-white tabloid into a full-color magazine, and the launch (and several relaunches) of our website. At each stage, she was a voice for modest, measured change, and for making good use of every penny that HCN’s readers provided.
She understood that our readers care about the West and the issues we cover, not flashy graphics; images aren’t just for decoration, they are windows into the stories themselves. “Because she was a journalist, it gave her the ability to talk at the editorial meetings about the stories themselves,” recalled one former publisher, Paul Larmer. “She had an editorial eye. That served HCN well.”
Every two weeks for 30 years (we only shifted to our current monthly schedule in 2020), Cindy wrangled stories from HCN’s editors and images from across the West and sent another issue off to the printer. In all that time, she recalls only once missing the deadline: A computer glitch erased a feature story, and she worked all weekend to get the pieces back in place. The issue went out just a few days late. Readers never knew what happened.
In the spring of 2020, as the staff scattered during the early days of COVID, Cindy was one of the last people in the office, getting yet another issue off to the printer. “I remember packing up and thinking, jeez, what if I never come back here?” It was just a fleeting thought, she said, but it was prescient. The editorial staff had dispersed across the region a few years earlier, embracing new tools for working remotely. The rest of the staff followed suit, at first out of necessity and later because of the flexibility afforded by working from home.
Today, our customer service team fills the space that once served as Cindy’s quiet kingdom in downtown Paonia. It’s all the office space we need.
If all goes as planned, the May issue will be the last that Cindy oversees. By her count, it will be number 750.
“She can go through almost the entire archive of High Country News and say, ‘I had a hand in this issue,’” said Paul, marveling. She also had a hand in winning enough art and design awards to blanket a wall, and training our talented visuals team, which now includes two full-time staffers and a contract designer, plus a vast constellation of freelance photographers and illustrators.
What’s next for Cindy? She and Don built a house out on the family property some years ago. The architecture is inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and the rooms are finished with honey-colored softwood and awash with sunlight. They’ve had an addition in the works for 15 years now that might finally get finished. There’s the garden that’s been wanting more of her attention. (Paonia staffers salivate at the memory of the cherry tomatoes she brought to the office.) She might get back to writing, and there are things (besides HCN) to read, places they’ve been longing to see. And a life, after all these years, free of deadlines.
We wish her the very best.
Think you might be the one to fill Cindy’s shoes, or know someone who might be right for the job? Find more information at hcn.org/design-director.
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.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
