In September, members of the HCN staff and board gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, to reconnect and reset after another year of hard work. The aspen leaves were going gold on the hillsides, elk lumbered about the grounds, and there was even a dusting of snow up high one morning.
The gathering started with the board’s fall business meeting, where we heard from the management team about our 2027 budget. We’re projecting a spending increase from roughly $4.3 million this year to a little over $4.4 million next. The most significant bumps will come in payroll, taxes and benefits, which make up 58% of our expenses for the year, and the budget for freelance writers and photographers, which constitutes another 14% of our annual spending. We’ll pay for all of this with a combination of donations, grants and “earned revenue,” including subscriptions and ad sales.
Mia Axon, our acting director of philanthropy, noted that HCN’s financial strength springs from the generosity of our readers. Thousands of you make tax-deductible donations each year in addition to paying for your subscriptions. We recently ran a report that found 750 people who have given to HCN regularly for 20 years now. One reader has donated every year for 36 years! This stalwart support is especially important when national foundations are overwhelmed with shoring up public media and the critical human services that have lost public funding in recent years.
Director of Product & Marketing Gary Love announced that our circulation grew 3% last year, and he expects it to continue to rise. That’s in part because more of you are staying with us. A remarkable 45% of print subscribers have signed up for automatically renewing subscriptions, along with more than 80% of digital subscribers, which means that we don’t have to chase you down and ask you to re-up every year. Thank you!
HCN Acting Director of Philanthropy Mia Axon, Board Secretary Chris Winter and Executive Director & Publisher Greg Hanscom (top left); Board Fundraising Chair Jim Spencer and HCN Fundraising Communications Specialist Anna Demetriades (top right). The whole crew in Estes Park, Colorado (bottom).
Our new editor-in-chief, Kate Schimel, shared that she and Executive Editor Gretchen King have been working with their team to refocus our reporting on the things that HCN does best. Kate talks about this in the Editor’s Note, but the short version is that our journalism will continue to be rooted in the land and our relationship to it, and more tightly focused on serving rural and Indigenous communities, small towns and small cities.
The rest of our time together was facilitated by Daniel Student with the Potrero Group. We started with an exercise that had everyone share one thing that has changed for the better during their time at HCN. It was a great reminder of how far we’ve come since the days when we put out a magazine every two weeks, wrestled with outdated software, and built our circulation strategy on “direct mail” hawking cheap subscriptions. (Our email newsletters are the primary driver for new subscriptions these days.)
Then we broke into small groups, tackling some of the issues that have been hanging us up, including the challenges of communicating and collaborating in a remote workplace and the curse of too many Zoom meetings. We finished with an exercise that teed up a strategic planning process that we’ll embark on in the coming months.
We’re grateful to HCN board members Jim Spencer and Mike Tansey for making the gathering possible.
So long, and thanks for all the bagels!
When Mary Zachman started as HCN’s finance and payroll administrator in January 2019, she worked in a tiny cubbyhole in the back of our crowded Paonia, Colorado, office. In the years that followed, the staff dispersed across the West, and Mary’s role ballooned. She would eventually set up and file taxes in 15 different states. Last year, she sent out 155 1099s to freelancers and contractors, almost double the number in 2019.
Through all of these changes, Mary has been a calm and steady hand, working quietly behind the scenes to make sure everyone got paid on time, entering literally thousands of accounting transactions and wheedling us to send in our credit card receipts. Now, she’s stepping away from HCN to care for her family and do more of the things she loves: walking her dogs, tending her garden, and baking gorgeous sourdough bread and bagels. We wish her the very best.
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This article appeared in the November 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A fall gathering in the Rockies.”
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