Future-proofing HCN
Long-term plans for the organization come together alongside staff changes.
The High Country News Board of Directors met in January with a couple of serious topics up for discussion: our finances and a draft strategic plan.
Finances have been a nail-biter. Fall is our best time for fundraising, but we lagged behind into December, although, in the end, our readers came through once again. Between October and the end of the year, you contributed more than $300,000 — almost closing the budgetary gap. We still have work to do, but thanks to you, we ended the year in good shape.
The draft strategic plan is basically a blueprint for sustaining HCN over the long haul. We have big ambitions — we want to see more high-impact investigative reporting, as well as more timely news and analysis on our website, and we’d love to have more opportunities to meet face-to-face with readers. The board and staff have spent the past six months working on a plan for how to get to where we want to be despite the ups and downs that are sure to come.
Borrowing a tech industry term that’s been repurposed by planners preparing for climate change, Acting Editor-in-Chief Michelle Nijhuis calls this “future-proofing.”
Preserving our past
In January’s column, I mentioned that we’re looking for a home for a storage building full of HCN’s papers and records. I got a flurry of responses from across the region, with suggestions including the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and special collections at Stanford and UCLA. I’ve also heard from folks at Colorado State University, New Mexico State University and History Colorado, not to mention the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, which holds the papers of HCN founder Tom Bell.
Thank you for all your suggestions. I’ll be exploring options over the coming months. If you have any thoughts or ideas, please email me at [email protected].
Farewells and welcomes
At the end of January, HCN said goodbye to Kathy Martinez, who had been with us for nearly 28 years — most recently as special projects manager and the manager of our customer service team in Paonia.
A chance run-in with Betsy Marston while volunteering at a school concession stand led to an ever-escalating string of roles, titles and responsibilities. “Every time HCN offered a temporary, fill-in position, I was all in,” Kathy said recently. It’s easy to understand how her energy and appetite for plowing through to-do lists and untangling knotty problems made her indispensable all these years.
She was also a steady source of help, comfort and home cooking, welcoming waves of interns and staffers to a new town when HCN was solely a Paonia operation. We’ll miss her dearly.
We also welcomed some new faces to HCN:
• Peter Schoenberg, board member, a veteran defense lawyer based in New Mexico.
• Raksha Vasudevan, contributing editor, a former aid worker and a writer whose work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, among other honors.
• Taylar Stagner, intern, an Arapaho and Shoshone journalist who reports from Wyoming primarily for our Indigenous Affairs desk.
• Sam Shaw, intern, a writer and photographer based on Colorado’s Front Range.
We welcome reader letters. Greg Hanscom is the executive director & publisher of High Country News. Email us at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
