I’m delighted to be able to inform you that High Country News has finally flipped the switch on a whole new digital us — the culmination of more than a year’s worth of work spent documenting, consolidating, parsing, building, and migrating from antiquated technology to a suite of modern platforms that, well … do exactly what we’ve been pretending to do all along.
You see, HCN had this habit of plugging any gaping digital holes with live humans. (This is technically legal in all Western states, but not necessarily efficient or remotely easy on the humans involved.)
Picture it: You went to our website and signed up for a subscription, trusting that some digital whirligigs in the background would instantly whisk your information into a big data closet and present you with the keys to your fancy new account. Wrong! Instead, every morning, a person — let’s call them, say, “Tammy” or “KHowe” — had to download a spreadsheet for everyone who tried to subscribe the day before, going through every single cell, fixing and tweaking, until at last they could upload it into our subscription software. There was no magic pipeline from website to database, just hardworking humans laboring to ferry your subscriptions across the breach.
This pay-no-attention-to-the-wizard-behind-the-curtain charade was repeated for almost anything you can think of involving your relationship with HCN.
But no longer! On Feb. 6, we switched over to all-new systems.
The upshot for you is that it should be significantly easier to deal with anything related to High Country News. (The upshot for us is that it will make life a whole lot easier for our invaluable customer service folks.) Meanwhile, we can do something we’ve wanted to do for ages: Offer you a subscription that renews automatically, no flood of renewal notices required.
Update your address? Easy. Pause your magazine delivery while you’re out of town? Click a button. Save your payment information? No problem. View subscription details and renew whenever it’s convenient? Absolutely. Now, you can go directly to your new account dashboard. Giving gift subscriptions or making recurring donations have also become much easier. Learn how to log in, etc., at hcn.org/tutorials.
I hope you’re all as excited by this upgrade as Tammy and KHowe are!
Best of all, there will still be live human beings here in Paonia available to pick up the phone and answer any questions you have. Feel free to call us at 970-527-4898, Monday through Thursday, between 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. MT — even if it’s just to congratulate our wonderful staff.
New fellows
Two new editorial fellows joined High Country News in January.
Erin X. Wong, who graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in May 2022, will be reporting from the San Francisco Bay Area. They were most recently an environmental justice fellow with The Uproot Project, a network for journalists of color who cover environmental issues.
Former HCN editorial intern Natalia Mesa is staying on as a fellow. Natalia, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Washington, has worked as a freelance journalist and correspondent for The Scientist, Hakai, Scientific American and others. She is based in Seattle.
We’re thrilled to have both of them for the next year!
Michael Schrantz is the marketing communications manager for High Country News based in Santa Fe. Email him at michael.schrantz@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the March 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A new digital us.”
