Last month, we shared the news that our editor-in-chief, Jennifer Sahn, was leaving HCN. This month, we present the dynamic duo who’ll lead HCN’s editorial staff for the next leg of the journey: Kate Schimel, our new editor-in-chief, and Gretchen King, who has taken on new, expanded duties in her role as executive editor.
Kate is on her third tour with HCN. She started as an intern back in 2015 and became an assistant editor later that year. For the next four years, she helped HCN build out our Indigenous affairs team, cover grazing and public-land use, interrogate the idea of wilderness and prioritize investigative work. Do you remember our special issue on recreation’s power — and perils (May 14, 2018)? Kate was the force behind that.
Ready to return to her roots in local news, Kate then took a job at Colorado Public Radio, where she edited a national award-winning investigation of teen suicide and led CPR’s coverage of COVID-19. From there, she hopped to the investigative news nonprofit Searchlight New Mexico and the Southern New Mexico News Collaborative before returning to HCN in 2022 as our news and investigations editor.
Born and raised on Colorado’s Front Range, Kate attended Reed College in Portland and has since lived in Washington and New Mexico. She and her husband, Ethan Linck, now live in Bozeman, Montana, with their daughter and a badly behaved border collie.
Gretchen has been a quiet force behind HCN for years now (quiet, that is, unless you’re late turning in copy for an upcoming issue of the magazine, as this writer often is). She and her husband, Mike, and son, Riley, moved to Paonia, Colorado, in 2007 and started a microbrewery a few blocks from HCN’s office. The writing was on the wall, however: She had a master’s degree in communications from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and had spent several years as a journalism instructor.
It took us a few years, but we finally lured Gretchen down the street to become our community engagement coordinator in 2014. Since then, she’s filled roles across the organization, from spearheading website redesigns to overseeing our intern and fellowship programs. Raised in Grand Junction, Colorado, she now lives in Gunnison, where she enjoys all the great recreation that comes with life at one of the largest tributaries of the Colorado River.
Kate and Gretchen make a great team. Kate has a clear vision for HCN’s future, one founded on rigorous reporting and built around community needs and real-world impact. And Gretchen, the master of our editorial processes, always keeps the trains — and the copy — running on time. In other words, Kate focuses on the “what” and Gretchen is all about the “how.”
We’re delighted to welcome them into their new roles!
Billy Arnold, our new partnerships editor, traveled to New Orleans in August for the annual gathering of Report for America, our national partner in the Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative. There, he met our first four WERC reporters: Stephanie Casanova (Arizona Luminaria), Teal Davis (Wyoming Public Media), Nick Mott (Mountain Journal/Montana Free Press) and Chart Riggall (Ouray County Plaindealer), noting that “none of us lives in a place where getting to and from the Big Easy is all that easy.”
Still, they had plenty of fun, sharing meals, enjoying live music, zipping around on rental bikes — oh, and discussing their aspirations for WERC and the topics they’ve been covering, ranging from gray wolves, grazing in burn scars and the continuing conflict over border wall construction to the on-going disagreements between the Colorado River Basin states. You can find their reporting on the websites
of their home publications, or read them here.
HCN hits the road
At a time when our communities are experiencing rapid and often unprecedented change, and the news industry undergoes its own tumultuous transformation, the High Country News staff and board want to hear from you — the people who live and work in the West — about the most pressing issues you’re facing, and how HCN can support you in your efforts to drive positive change.
And so we’re embarking on a year-long “listening tour” — a series of road trips that will take us to the near and far corners of the region to visit local community halls, watering holes, parks and other gathering places. We’ll meet with readers and community leaders, partnering with local nonprofit and news organizations to discuss how this place is changing and how we can step up and be of service.
Watch for more information in upcoming issues, and check for updates. If you want to help organize a community event, or if you have suggestions for places we should visit or groups we should partner with, please send us a postcard or email dearfriends@hcn.org. We’re looking forward to spending some time together!
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.
This article appeared in the October 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “New leadership for HCN.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
