Writers on the Range
Overview
Writers on the Range is an independent nonprofit opinion service based in Paonia, Colorado, that syndicates columns about the American West to newspapers across the region. Its subject matter is the working and living West: public lands, water, wildlife, ranching and farming, rural communities, energy development and the changing economics of small towns. Rather than supplying straight news reporting, the service commissions and distributes signed commentary, written largely by people who live with the issues they describe — ranchers, scientists, teachers, former agency staff, tribal members, recreationists and local officials — and places that commentary on the opinion pages where Western readers debate policy.
The service describes its purpose in simple terms: to spur lively conversation about the West. That formulation matters. Writers on the Range was not built to advance a single party line, and over its life it has published voices that disagree with one another about grazing, predators, dams, development and conservation. What unites the columns is a regional frame and an insistence that Western experience should be heard in Western papers, at a time when much national commentary about the region is written from coastal metropolitan newsrooms. The entry in this directory is listed from Paonia, the small town in western Colorado's North Fork Valley that has long been home to the service and to its parent-turned-sibling publication, High Country News.
Origins in Montana
The service did not begin in Colorado. According to an account by Dave Marston, its publisher, the opinion service began with foundation help in Montana in 1994. Its two founders were Karl Hess and John Baden, figures associated with free-market environmentalism in the Northern Rockies. The Montana experiment lasted about four years. By 1998 the founders had concluded they could not sustain it and offered the service to High Country News — for free.
High Country News, the nonprofit newsmagazine headquartered in Paonia since 1983, was then led by Ed and Betsy Marston. The Marstons hesitated: taking on a syndication service meant finding money and staff time to restart something that had already faltered once. The deciding factor was a contribution of $34,000 from HCN contributor John McBride, which gave the revived service enough runway to relaunch. Staffer Paul Larmer, who would later become executive director of High Country News, was chosen in 1998 to run the effort and to cultivate grassroots Westerners as writers. That choice of mission — recruiting contributors from the region rather than relying on professional pundits — has defined the service ever since.
The High Country News Years
Under High Country News, Writers on the Range grew into a regular feature of Western opinion pages. A 2005 profile of High Country News noted that the paper produced three syndicated columns a week under the Writers on the Range title, appearing in more than 70 newspapers in the West. For a small nonprofit operation in a town of roughly 1,500 people, that was a substantial distribution footprint, and it multiplied the reach of HCN's mission far beyond its own subscriber base. A column might be written for a Paonia audience but be read the same week in Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Idaho, Arizona and New Mexico papers.
The arrangement also fit the editorial culture Ed and Betsy Marston built at HCN after moving it from Lander, Wyoming, in 1983: deep attention to public lands and natural resources, skepticism toward both industrial development and distant bureaucracy, and respect for rural knowledge. Betsy Marston edited High Country News for 19 years, and her editorial hand later became central to Writers on the Range itself. The syndication service functioned, in effect, as the opinion arm of that worldview — except that, as a syndicate, it deliberately opened its columns to contributors who did not always share it.
Becoming an Independent Nonprofit
In its later life, Writers on the Range separated from High Country News and continued as an independent nonprofit. Public radio station KVNF, which serves the North Fork Valley and carries a weekly Writers on the Range feature, describes it in those terms — an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West — and notes that Betsy Marston started the modern service with her son. Dave Marston, Betsy's son, serves as publisher, while Betsy Marston has served as editor, reading columns on KVNF's weekly broadcast, which airs Mondays and Saturdays.
Dave Marston brought a background in business, specializing in equity and debt investments and property, and writes himself about the economic institutions of the West, with a focus on agriculture, natural resources and water. His byline appears regularly in the service's output and in partner publications, often examining how Western counties cope with booms, busts and transitions — for example, comparing counties that adapted to economic change with those that did not. The family character of the operation is unusual in syndication, a field dominated historically by large commercial feature syndicates, but it reflects the service's scale: a small editorial core, a wide contributor network and distribution built on relationships with Western newspaper editors.
Services and Operations
The core service is weekly opinion syndication. Writers on the Range sends out columns — in recent years described by the service itself as 52 opinions a year, one for each week — to subscribing and partner newspapers, which publish them on their editorial and op-ed pages, in print and online. Editors receive work that is already edited, regionally focused and ready to run, which is valuable to small Western dailies and weeklies whose staffs have shrunk and whose opinion pages still need fresh, relevant material beyond wire-service national punditry.
Alongside newspaper distribution, the service maintains its own website, writersontherange.org, where columns are published and archived, and it reaches audio audiences through KVNF, where a new short feature is broadcast each week, read either by the author or by editor Betsy Marston. That combination — syndication, direct web publication and public-radio carriage — is characteristic of small nonprofit media in the rural West, layering several modest channels into one meaningful regional presence.
Contributors and Subject Matter
The contributor model is the service's signature. Instead of a stable of columnists under contract, Writers on the Range recruits people with direct stakes in its subjects. Its year-end review of 2023, for example, pointed readers back to a year's worth of columns that included a moving personal account by writer Stephen Trimble of his brother's death, and a piece by Joe Stone on the burning of giant sequoias. Other columns in the service's stream have addressed Yellowstone's wildlife and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, wildfire management — including the use of cattle grazing to reduce fine fuels along fire lines — affordable housing in resort and rural communities, wheat farming and food banks, water scarcity and the future of farming in a drying West.
Recurring themes include the meaning of public land — one widely carried column argued that public land is what sets the American West apart — the pressure of population growth on water and wildlife, and the cultural friction between longtime residents and newcomers. Because contributors write from experience, the tone ranges from elegiac to argumentative, and editors who carry the service accept that some columns will please their readers and others will provoke them. That provocation is part of the product: the service's own history includes internal debate at High Country News in 2001 over whether a column defending a federal roadless-area initiative, written by a timber-industry communications director, should have been distributed at all — an episode remembered precisely because the syndicate's openness cut both ways.
Distribution and Reach
At its documented peak under High Country News, the service appeared in more than 70 Western newspapers with three columns a week. In its independent form it continues to place columns in papers across the West and in regional online outlets, and individual columns are frequently republished by partner publications and journals, including Mountain Journal, where Writers on the Range pieces appear as part of a collaboration. The Durango Telegraph and other Colorado papers regularly carry its columns, with the standard tagline identifying it as an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about Western issues and its publisher living in Durango, Colorado.
The reach is modest by national syndication standards and significant by regional ones. Western newspapers remain unusually important civic institutions in their communities, and a single syndicated column can frame a local argument about a mine, a water transfer or a housing shortage in town after town simultaneously. Writers on the Range was built to exploit exactly that structure: many small papers, one shared landscape.
Key Figures
Karl Hess and John Baden founded the original Montana service in 1994. Ed Marston, publisher of High Country News, and Betsy Marston, its longtime editor, made the decision to adopt the service in 1998 and shaped its editorial identity. John McBride's $34,000 contribution financed the relaunch. Paul Larmer, its first cultivator of grassroots contributors, later led High Country News as executive director. In the independent era, Betsy Marston has been the editorial center of the service, work recognized in April 2022 when the Society of Professional Journalists honored her with a Keeper of the Flame award at its Top of the Rockies event, citing both her 19 years editing High Country News and her ongoing work as editor of Writers on the Range. Dave Marston, her son, serves as publisher and business manager and is the service's most visible contemporary byline.
Recognition and Community Role
Beyond industry recognition for its editor, the service's role is civic. KVNF's inclusion of Writers on the Range as a regular program — in a lineup built around regional news and local voices — reflects how the service is treated in its home valley: not as an outside wire, but as a neighbor's forum. Its columns are read aloud, argued about and answered locally, even as the same texts run in papers hundreds of miles away. Few syndicates operate at that dual scale.
Current Status
Writers on the Range continues to operate as an independent nonprofit opinion service from Paonia, Colorado, publishing weekly columns on its website, distributing them to newspapers across the West and broadcasting a weekly feature on KVNF. Its output in the mid-2020s — columns on Yellowstone, wildfire, housing, farming and water — shows the same agenda set at its 1998 relaunch: Western people writing about Western ground, for Western readers, in their own papers.
