We want to thank everyone who pitched in to support High Country News’ year-end fund drive. It was a great success. Your subscriptions and donations comprise three-quarters of HCN’s operating revenue, compensating our writers and editors and keeping the lights on in our Paonia, Colorado, office. We’re humbled by your generosity and more grateful than we can say.
Like nonprofits and news organizations across the country, however, HCN is not immune to the forces at work in the world today. Rising staff costs and a challenging economic climate forced us to say farewell to three employees in late 2025.
Michael Leveton was HCN’s community outreach manager. With a background in corporate communications, he helped HCN build partnerships with social media “influencers” who put our work in front of audiences that seldom spend much time reading magazines. We miss his sense of humor and are sorry that we never got to see him wrestle: By night, Michael is a luchador in the Lucha Libre tradition.
Carol Newman was a dedicated member of our fundraising team who sent out thousands of thank-you notes that many of you received in the mail over her six-plus years at HCN. An accomplished artist whose work can be seen in local galleries, she often shared her latest vibrant mosaics on Zoom calls with fellow staffers.
And we will miss Jess Kiernan, who worked on our customer service team, processing checks from readers, renewing subscriptions and handling new and gift subscriptions to support our nonprofit journalism. Jess is a former pastry chef and mother to an adorable toddler, Sunny.
A West-wide reporting collaborative
Working collaboratively is a cornerstone of HCN’s journalistic philosophy. Our reporters and editors regularly partner with other publications to share resources and write dynamic stories that empower communities to act on behalf of the Western U.S.
Now, HCN is teaming up with the national nonprofit Report for America to create a West-wide corps of environmental reporters who will work in local newsrooms and concentrate on serving rural and Indigenous communities. High Country News will serve as the hub, working with partner newsrooms and reporters, providing workshops and other educational opportunities to those who are just starting out and coordinating collaborations between newsrooms.
We’re calling it the Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative, or WERC (with apologies to WORC, the storied Western Organization of Resource Councils). It’s a way for HCN to deepen our roots and build and rebuild a network of reporters focused on communities that are often overlooked by urban and national media outlets.
We’ll be announcing our first cohort of partners in the coming months and hope to have collaborators in all 12 Western states by 2028, with additional reporters watchdogging Congress and federal agencies. Everything produced by our WERC reporters will be available for publication by all the newsrooms in the collaborative.
Watch this space for more details. And an extra-hearty thank-you to the supporters who have already pitched in to help get this project off the ground!
Remembering an inspiring American
We were saddened to hear of the passing of Betty Reid Soskin, who taught about the Black experience during World War II at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California.
At 104, she was the oldest ranger serving at the National Park Service. But she was much more than that, according to Wayne Hare, a former park ranger himself who served on HCN’s board of directors. Soskin was a “living historian,” Wayne wrote in an email newsletter for his Civil Conversations Project.
“Betty was raised in the South by her father and great grandmother who was born into slavery in the 1840s. … So this one family lived, worked, experienced, and discussed history that ran from the Dred Scott decision — where the Supreme Court decided that slaves had no standing to take part in the court system because they were not citizens, nor even human, through slavery; the Civil War; the Emancipation Proclamation,” all the way to “the swearing in of America’s first Black president in the shadow of the Lincoln memorial where the cycle all began.
“History is not only informative, but it’s just downright interesting,” Wayne concludes. “But from a first-person account? Someone who was there? It’s amazing.”
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 February 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Thank -yous and farewells.”
