In 1996, High Country News ran a piece about Santa Fe’s fading allure as a high-end tourist destination. The publication was still printed on newsprint like your local paper; above the fold, a classic Southwestern coyote howled and slowly disintegrated. Lower down, Santa Fe’s outspoken new mayor, Debbie Jaramillo, blasted previous leaders’ dedication to promoting tourism over people’s needs.
“We don’t need any more videos of people getting out of Porsches and women on ski slopes,” she said.
This is the first piece of journalism I remember. I found it on the table in my parents’ house on Colorado’s Front Range. When I first began working at HCN in 2015, I spotted that shabby coyote on the wall in the production room. And in 2021, when I moved to Santa Fe to work at a local investigative outlet, I found a town still facing the issues HCN had explored in 1996. Not long before I arrived, the Santa Fe Reporter reinterviewed Jaramillo, whose single term was tarnished by accusations of nepotism.
That article, itself soon an iconic piece of local journalism, was titled “Was Debbie right?” Everyone knew who the headline meant. Jaramillo’s fingerprints were all over town, from development targeted at the middle class to fury over economic inequality and the town’s colonial past and present.
This is what reporting can do: Show us the moment we’re in, where it came from and who played a part. It can reveal, at a human scale, where the world is in the midst of reshaping itself. It can show us, too, where things are ripe for reshaping.
In this issue, you’ll find a handful of similar examples: Stories from our archives that have new insights to offer, from the battles over Utah’s national monuments to the little-known backstories of Trump administration appointees.
My background is as a reporter, from local beat reporting and public radio to many corners of HCN, and reporting will remain my focus as editor-in-chief. Communities need better and more in-depth information, particularly here in the Western U.S., which still often exists at the fringes of the national conversation. A place like Santa Fe — or Malheur National Wildlife Refuge or Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — may have its brief moment in the spotlight, when hundreds of journalists dedicate their intelligence, creativity and curiosity to understanding it. But their attention doesn’t remain. Ours does.
The reality of the West’s communities is far more complex than it appears in national media or even, at times, in the local papers. In digging through our archives, I was reminded how easy it is to see only the broad outlines and miss the nuances that complicate things. That is the task before HCN and my charge to you as readers: See the details clearly. We’re on the hunt for those tricky little stories that say more than their bare facts. Tell us yours. Thank you for your trust.
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.
