Summer publishing break
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After five years in the HCN office, associate editor Sarah Gilman deserved a Hawaiian beach vacation before her move to Portland, Oregon, where she'll continue to write for the magazine.
Sarah Gilman
In our 22-issue-per-year publishing schedule, we'll be skipping the next issue. Look for High Country News in your mailbox again around July 21. You can keep up with Western news and views on our website, hcn.org, for fresh articles, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
June board meeting
At the tail end of May, 10 members of our board of directors gathered in our hometown of Paonia, Colorado, for a two-day meeting with staff, including our two senior field editors, Ray Ring of Bozeman, Montana, and Jonathan Thompson of Durango, Colorado. After sharing the good news – finances are healthy for the moment and paid circulation is up more than 7 percent from a year ago – the board discussed improving HCN's coverage of the West's 1 million acres (not including Alaska, where our writers occasionally venture). One idea is to expand our network of field editors and correspondents, something that's already happening with the deployment of former assistant editor Cally Carswell to Santa Fe and longtime associate editor Sarah Gilman's upcoming move to Portland, Oregon. Managing such a far-flung crew will require better communication and technology, but the benefits are major, including more interesting stories, both print and online. Stay tuned for more on this in 2015.
Congrats to HCNers!
We're proud to announce that HCN intern Ben Goldfarb and former HCN assistant editor Laura Paskus won the Frank Allen Field Reporting Award. The award, from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, provides grants for reporting projects that focus on the environment, conservation and energy production or development. Many an HCN writer has benefited from IJNR's intense expedition-style training programs for reporters, covering topics from Northwest salmon to New Mexico energy production.
Ben also received a fellowship from COMPASS, which helps connect scientists and journalists, to attend the North American Congress for Conservation Biology this summer in Missoula, Montana, as did HCN contributing editor Michelle Nijhuis and former intern Joshua Zaffos.
Corrections
In our May 26 "Drought Watch" snapshot, the map shows the Klamath Basin on the border of Oregon and Washington; it should be on the Oregon-California border. In the June 9 issue, "Snowmobiling for science," Kyle Krapster's last name is actually spelled Crapster. Our apologies, Kyle.
Alert reader David Robertson of Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania, sent us a note about the May 26 edition of "Heard Around the West": "The hapless near-victims of the California wood-chipping were black-crowned night-herons, not black-crowned herons." Fortunately, our correction goes further: Despite initial reports, NO birds whatsoever ended up in wood chippers. According to The New York Times, the young herons accidentally fell in the course of tree-trimming and were taken to a bird rescue center, where "they all had bruises and scrapes, and one bird had a fractured mandible requiring surgery." All are expected to make a full recovery. "Heard around the West" is like neighbors gossiping over the fence; sometimes people, papers and rumors turn out to be wrong. We're just glad this story has a happy ending.
