Welcome back to the podcast katie hill hey jeff thanks for having me so you're still in in texas waking up at 10 a.m having coffee and just easing into your day, yeah not exactly 10 a.m it has been hard to wake up early after the holidays but yep still down here it's actually below freezing down here right now which is kind of shocking but feels like real winter so yeah it's rainy atmospheric river 44 45 degrees that's kind of standard southeast alaska brutal brutal
you don't see the sun i'll go to school in the dark and i'll come home and i'll start to get uh to get dark so it's hard to kind of get that motivation to get up and and and be productive and write or or do whatever what's your routine when you wake up and you got to get stuff done as a freelancer? What's your routine to get words on a page? My morning routine, I was actually just thinking about this this morning. That's so funny you ask that.
My routine in the morning is a bit on the slow side. I am not like a morning warrior. I wake up, I make a cup of coffee, I feed our cat and I unload and reload our dishwasher And I sit down to the book for 15 or 20 minutes and just kind of like wake up slow. I've tried running in the morning. I've tried writing early in the morning. Nothing good ever really comes of either. So yeah, I like a slow morning. I don't know if that's, that will probably change with time.
I have to imagine just kind of understanding how like my parents operate and how a lot of older writers work. Like I'm sure there will be the day where I'm up at three and I have like a notebook next to my bed, but the day is not today. When you have an idea that kind of sounds like, like crock pot writing where you kind of get an idea and you can't immediately start writing necessarily. Sometimes you kind of need to let it work itself out a little bit. Then you can put words to the page.
When you do find something that you're pretty passionate about, like the last piece you wrote for the Western about the past of outdoor writing or what outdoor writing was and what outdoor writing is, was that something that kind of jumped out at you? And were you able to just kind of sit down and write that one? Or when you get these heavy ideas, is it fast and furious or does it still take a lot of time to, I guess, ripen?
It definitely, that one took a while. That story was a work in progress from the summer until when we finally published it. And it really, I mean, it really did start with me finding that 1994 issue of Wyoming Wildlife. And I just looked at the date on the publication and on the cover. And I was like, oh, my gosh, you know, it was July at the time. And I was like, this is going to turn 30 years old next month.
And then when I actually started reading it, I realized how, and of course, you know, it did read it like it was dated. It's 30 years old. But just some of like the deeper tones and meanings and themes were just really interesting. Really awesome and deep and interesting. And I really loved Chris Madsen's editor's note, and so it just felt like a great opportunity to kind of ask the question of what can the last 30 years of outdoor media teach us about the next 30?
What happened since that issue published.
And how can that like better prepare us especially younger writers who are kind of staring down the barrel of these next few decades without any real certainty of what they're going to look like you know are there some lessons to take away from those three decades since that issue published, and so yeah the answer I came up with isn't exactly what I was expecting but yeah I guess And the piece that resulted from that, we kind of ended up turning it into this opportunity to launch the idea of or
just announce the newspaper. So it ended up kind of working out well that way. And as a result, it was a six month. It took six months to write and to edit and to refine and to kind of develop. I wrote, I did like a big cathartic write and it definitely was not ready to see the world. So Kestrel and Nicole helped me kind of whittle it down and get it into good shape. It seems like that's one of the main elements of content today is that editorial content.
In phase of things. One of the great things about now is that you don't have those barriers of entry. I still have a rejection letter from Field and Stream Magazine. They sent me a letter. My first rejection came from that and I have it on the wall. My students ask me, why do you have a rejection letter? Well, A, this is when they sent letters to you saying, sorry, this doesn't work. And then B, just that getting out there and trying.
But now without editors, you can just publish whatever you want without any sort of oversight, any sort of other eyes to help make it better. And that kind of leads me into this question of writing versus content and that the golden age of writing may or may not be in the twilight or maybe it's in the golden years, but golden age of content where anybody can just do anything. Where do you land on the golden age of writing versus the golden age of content
and where we're at now? Yeah, that's a great question. I definitely don't think we are in the twilight of the golden age of writing. I think, kind of like you mentioned, some of these online platforms, Substack is a great example. It's a place where people who are really talented writers who might not necessarily have access to editor contacts or just the publishing industry or the magazine industry or the newspaper industry in general, or maybe they fear going through that rejection process.
It does really lower the barrier to entry for writers, really, really great writers, not so great writers, people who just have something to say, which I think there's probably something beautiful about that. And I mean, at the same time, we also have more books hitting shelves than ever before and book sales exploded during COVID and people are reading a lot.
The people who read, read a lot. And so I think you're kind of seeing that like supply and demand balance out and people are definitely kind of rising to meet that demand. And so I think the golden age of writing, I'm not really sure how I would even begin to define that, but it feels like a good time to write as far as the golden age of content.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really hard to tell what's going to happen with, you know, I guess what you probably define as content, which is, you know, more social media content, digital content. I just kind of call it stuff, just like it's anything to stay relevant. You know, there's the make one post per day or three meaningful posts per day. So you're just flooding with stuff. So the algorithm picks you up, which is kind of different than contributing
meaningful something to the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds very, very social media coded. So let's work off of that example. I found this study that conducted, you know, researchers conducted surveys on people's like satisfaction with their social media use, social media user experience. And I don't know if it's also kind of like a New Year's resolution type thing, but people are putting their phones down. People are leaving social media.
People are very aware of screen fatigue and tech fatigue and social media anxiety. And, you know, we have better understandings now of all of these different sort of downsides to like really, really heavy social media use and social media addiction, I think is like probably the right word to use. So I don't necessarily know what the future of this golden age of content is, but I can't help but feel like.
Whether it's like waning or in its dusk or, you know, we're all I think we're all kind of sitting around and waiting to see what the next big thing is going to be. But it doesn't really feel like the current status quo or maybe the status quo of two years ago, let's say, is super sustainable over the long term because people just aren't happy.
That survey showed that over 50% of respondents were not enjoying social media and were, as a result, planning to either severely limit or completely phase out their use of social media by 2025. So we're here. It's January. People are resolution happy. be. I think a lot of people have New Year's resolutions to read more books or to journal or to start a sub stack or to spend less time on Instagram.
So we'll see if that has any real sticking power. But I think we just kind of wanted to create something that went in the opposite direction of that uncertainty, something really concrete, a model that for all its failings also still works for a lot of people. I mean, plenty of people subscribe to newspapers across the country. We love to hear about how the newspaper industry has absolutely bottomed out
and how it's failing. But, There are also great examples of physical newspapers that people absolutely still subscribe to and receive, especially in rural America, where, you know, community centers are more spread out or, you know, individual population centers are more spread out. And just, you know, people look for that community because that's what they rely on. So that's kind of, I guess, a reaction to this sort of feeling that maybe the golden age of content or stuff, as you might put it.
Is uncertain, I guess is the word I'll use. I don't necessarily want to say that it feels like it's at its end or that it's waning. I definitely don't have enough expertise or research to back that up, but it definitely feels more uncertain than it did maybe two or three or five years ago.
I remember when I was living in California, going to the fly fishing film tour and then watching some of those DVDs, that was kind of the DVD was starting to become the streaming age and the youtube age and the travel for your trout bum became less about like a really wealthy trout bum it was someone who had nothing else but saved all the money to go fish belize or to go you know to mongolia to fish for taming and then it became well what
else is there and then i think the same thing in the hunting there's so many slams and so many people can do things and like nothing is unreachable so now since there's nothing that's really new i think people might, go back to that well what's the story rather than something that i haven't heard about before man this person went hunting in afghanistan or pakistan or something like that wow that's that's pretty incredible
but i've kind of already heard that i already know that that sort of stuff happens so i'm going to be focused more on the story or what's going to entertain me or what i'm going to like more. It's just that story and how it's done rather than the shock value of something I'd never heard of before. Yeah. That's a really great point. Yeah. I guess, especially as I think as people, I mean, I can, again, I can only speak for myself, but like as the, I have a train rolling through right now.
I'm so sorry. Right. Oh no, I can't, I can't hear it. It's, it's great. The wind pier sounds like a train. Okay, cool. Did your train of thought get derailed? No, I'm trying to figure out how to word what I want to say. That's a good pun, though. Well, that's the cheesy Mr. Lund joke. That's classic Mr. Lund. On the students.
I think people what what hunt maybe what hunters or what outdoors people desire from outdoor media probably changes over time right i've been hunting for four years and over that span of time what i have wanted from outdoor media has changed and so and that's not a very long time so i think Like if there was a time when people were really seeking out those shock factor stories, which I think are always going to be interesting,
you know, especially if you're a new hunter and you're really fascinated by this new world that you stumbled into. And then you hear stories of really wide-reaching, faraway experiences and pursuits. Hemingway's stuff is never going to not attract audiences. People are always going to be obsessed with those stories.
But I do think as new hunters continue to find the practice enjoyable and something worth investing time and money into, the stories that really talk about kind of what those, you know, the guys in the duck blind with Chris Madsen's dad, John, were talking about why they hunt. The stories that tell them or remind them or make them think about why they hunt. Those, I think, They kind of have an ephemeral nature to them. And maybe they're kind of some of the original evergreen stories.
That phrase is used a lot in the digital media, just kind of as content that doesn't necessarily have a news hook to it. So stories that answer questions like, you know, how fast does a bear run was one that I wrote. You know, how long do deer live? That's kind of considered evergreen content in the digital media.
But there is definitely something really evergreen about stories that just talk about the emotional element of, you know, why the writer really felt connected to this one experience or this one particular species or this one particular landscape. And if there is a finite number of ways to tell that story, I don't think we've found it yet. Especially as the practice of hunting continues to kind of mold and flex with the user group, with the population of hunters out there in the field.
Society continues to change, and so how society interacts with hunting is going to continue to change. And so that means that there are always going to be new stories to write about why we hunt and what we get out of those experiences and how those experiences better open our eyes and our ears to the world around us. And so... I think that's kind of one of the little nibbles of job security that a lot of people in this field kind of cling to is that, you know, there's always a new thought.
There's always a different way to tell that story. So, I mean, who knows? Maybe industry veterans would disagree with me. Maybe I'm just, you know, kind of naive. But I like to believe that I'm going to be able to come up with new and unique ways to keep talking about this, this practice that, you know, a lot of people still really don't understand and really don't, you know, do. So we are still kind of an oddity.
And there are a lot of people out there who could be exposed to hunting and the hunting community through those kinds of stories. There's so many people who love the outdoors or love hunting or even just read the stories and there's constantly going to be a new generation of it. So it's, there's enough to have the people who will, they love to hunt, but will never read the publication, but that's fine.
You're not looking for everybody. You're not attempting to be the next, you know, huge media giant. So what do you think the, have you thought about what the paper looks like? Is it going to have the feel of an old, your local outdoors columnist meets a feature that you would read in Field and Stream or Graze meets a patchwork of other publications? Is that kind of what you're looking at for or what it's going to look like? Yeah, we have so many plans.
So one idea that we kind of keep returning to with the western newspaper is we want to create, a newspaper that kind of reads a little bit like a magazine we're publishing quarterly so we're not going to be publishing the hot breaking news of the minute are you happy about that because you've done a lot of that news stuff where are you gonna be doing that anyway and so the western is going to be your break from that. I think I'm, I hope that I get to continue to do that kind of work.
It's just not going to be for the Western because one, nobody wants a newspaper. Well, okay, let me rephrase that. The people who get newspapers every week probably love getting their newspaper every week, but nobody wants a niche, super narrow newspaper on their doorstep every week. We don't have new stuff to say in a newspaper that could, you know, fill a 32-page newspaper every week. So quarterly definitely feels like a good cadence for.
Cost effectiveness. We're, you know, a very, very low budget operation right now. We're working really hard to drum up more money and more funding in order to kind of continue moving forward with this enterprise. So four papers a year is probably the upper limit right now of what we can conceive as reasonable.
And so as far as the content of the publication goes, we are, really kind of casting a wide net features news you know features that have kind of a news analysis angle i think are great there's obviously a lot happening in the outdoor world that's that a lot of people have a lot to say about so we're looking forward to some kind of long form news analysis columns, opinions, essays, criticism. And then also, I mean, we are definitely trying to kind of emulate a little bit of like a lit mag feel.
So we would love to kind of elevate all the amazing poets and fiction writers and creative nonfiction writers in our space. And then we're really hoping, like one of the points of this publication is to build community. That's kind of one of our core tenets is creating something live and in person that really, that the outdoor and sporting communities both at the same time and everyone who exists in the overlap between the two can really rally around.
So we're publishing letters to the editor. We're publishing classified ads. We're publishing personal ads. Get off Tinder. Find love with the oyster. Find your new hunting buddies, your new backpacking buddies in our personal ads. We're publishing a youth section. So, you know, if you took your kid out and he harvested his first deer, have him write a little story about it. Send in some pictures, artwork.
I don't know, kids' mad libs. Like something that really kind of speaks to that next generation. And then, yeah, I mean, with like field, we call them field brags. I feel like every good old outdoor magazine has like the page or two of people. I think of like Bugle from RMEF always has like, you know, tons of just like old style gripping grins and with like, you know, little 50 word captions explaining who and roughly where and, you know, kind of what happened.
And so we really want to bring that back and just that kind of like old timey feel. So, yeah, I mean, it is kind of like part of. Magazine-style writing that you might get from a Graze or a Field and Stream or a Modern Huntsman or some of those really awesome, beautiful, rich publications, but in an impermanent form that also comes with some of those components of a community newspaper that I think people really miss. So that's kind of the rough plan. Yeah.
You wrote that written media stands to behave like glue in that regard rather than gasoline. Can you explain that a little bit? I think I know what you're getting at. I like the sentence, but can you extrapolate a little bit on the community building being more of a glue than a gasoline? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I can sound like to beat the horse dead of our time, Like, we're all more divided than we've ever been, right?
Like, there's, you know, post-election administrative transition coming up, like, especially in more rural parts of the country. I think some of those fissures are felt more deeply. And especially with some wildlife management issues and public lands management issues in the West, there are definitely a lot of ways that the outdoor and sporting communities probably find themselves divided.
And so, rather than contributing to some of that really polarizing rhetoric, we really wanted to create something that felt more like an open table with a bunch of empty chairs. And that's not to say that we're trying to create something that acts like an echo chamber. That's the opposite of what we're trying to do. Glue doesn't have to mean that everybody agrees, but maybe it means that somebody feels strongly about something that we publish.
And so they take the time to write a thoughtful letter to the editor rather than just like dashing off a half-baked angry opinion in a comment section somewhere. And so that's kind of what we're getting at, just kind of returning to a time where you actually had to think before you say something to somebody who you disagree with. We kind of think that the outdoor and sporting communities are, for the most part, better at that than maybe a lot of other pockets of humanity.
But we definitely think there could be more room for that kind of like just respectful ideological exchange. And so we really, really wanted to create something that just kind of acts as a platform for that.
And part of creating that platform just kind of means like slowing down the conversation rather than speeding it up, like let's slow it down and so that's kind of part of the goal with yeah and kind of part of the point of when i said glue rather than gasoline that makes a lot of sense there's we kind of talk until someone hits some sort of keyword that then allows us to jump on the keyword so if you're going to say we want to create an environment that's
if you say the word inclusive then all of a sudden oh my gosh you're you're doing one of those things it's like no different ideas different perspectives that word used to have a totally different meaning and now it means you know whatever the rhetoric on the on both sides want to want to make it.
But having a community of people who want to talk about and understand the nuance of conversation and how difficult these issues are, a lot of Alaskans are, I've never met an Alaskan who was for Pebble Mine. And yet I've met or talked to people who are like, hey, you know what? The road to Ambler is going to open up a lot of the state for people that people need jobs. If you're living in rural parts of the state, there's nothing there.
There's poverty, which is why there's domestic violence, which is why there's alcoholism.
There's nothing for these kids to do once they graduate so having jobs there is extremely important and most of us can't even afford to fly out to these parts of the state that want to be protected by other people so a road would be great just like the hall road allows people to drive up north to see prudhoe bay and see the tundra which that's a point is it worth the devastation that's going to happen is going to be worth the the 2 000 or so culverts and the crossing of these major rivers.
And then once you do an open pit mine, like you were devastating the, it's way worse than, than, than drilling for oil, whatnot, but you can have a conversation like that. So we both want to preserve habitat. We both want to preserve species, but you can land on either side of, of some of these topics. And I think that's an important thing that we kind of lose, like you said, with the half-baked reaction, because you saw a word or you, you think that this person is one of those people.
And so all of a sudden you jump on that rather than having good consolidated, messaging that includes nuance, that takes different opinions into, into account, but that's hard to, hard to escape. But I do think that people are, are hungry for that because we've been. We've been led around by the loud voices for so long. I think we're kind of like, Hey, let's, let's, let's not do that. That's, that's not what we're doing. Yeah. That's such a good point.
And the idea that, You know, like a hunter and a backcountry skier and, I don't know, mushroom forager can all agree on something or, you know, the people who I because I really I think one of the things that we keep coming back to is this kind of the what feels like a division between like what we'll call again, like I don't really love this phrasing, but.
The consumptive outdoor, the consumptive wildlife recreator, and the non-consumptive wildlife recreator or whatever, those who consume versus those who don't. And so, of course, with the idea being that the consumptive user is the hunter, angler, trapper, and the non-consumptive user is the birder, skier, wildlife watcher, photographer.
And that feels like a dividing line that, especially with some of just the issues at hand in wildlife and natural resource management across the country, across the West, in Alaska, it feels like that dividing line is really prevalent when those two groups have so much more in common. And so can we create something that speaks to both sides of that quote unquote divide? Because I really don't think the divide is as stark as people make it out to be.
And can we kind of just create a place for those people to recognize the similarities and the things they have in common? And there are definitely a lot of publications and a lot of platforms that are already doing that work and that already succeed at it. So we know that there's an appetite for it. We know that it works.
But we want to create something that also kind of fits into that space yeah it's it's you talk about how close we are in a lot of these things like the the the last at the last second it's like a divide so if we look at we care about care about making sure that we reduce our carbon footprint of you know use we obviously don't want uh habitat to be ruined and then it comes down to well that's why i don't hunt versus well what is my carbon footprint if i'm hiking
up the mountain i'm getting my meat myself, i'm not participating in the meat industry which is horrible and disgusting you don't have to ship the meat up to me so it's like if we're talking just carbon footprint then hunting in that regard if you can go just do it yourself out the backyard then that's a great connecting point i think in a lot of rural communities you do see that that the people who don't hunt but get it so they're not going to be antagonistic
like okay that's that's what you do i i don't do it i don't want to do it but I get it. It's fine. We can still live together up until we had the opportunity to.
See how people voted like we can now with social media you know we just see people at the store and we wouldn't really care so much what they believe politically and more just the type of person they were and politics were maybe second or maybe we kind of knew some politics about them but that wasn't the main thing their character and the fact that they cared about things was, was why we were still friends you could be a good person i disagree with you politically but man i just respect
you as a person you you know what you believe why you believe it and totally respect that and we can still go kayaking together and that's i think there's definitely hunger for that so i'm excited for this newspaper to see what the community ends up being yeah well i like my generation like has like lost like does not grasp that has failed to grasp that so and you know in some instances like with with good reason sometimes right like you know some of these conversations
are really hostile and some of these issues are so divisive. And so it can be kind of exhausting to constantly expose yourself to some of those debates. But I think that's kind of one of the reasons why I say that I'm not necessarily sure that that line. Exists separating hunters from the remainder of the community. I mean, time and time again, And I forget what the formal title of the survey is, but a survey basically testing America's attitudes towards hunting.
I want to say it's the National Shooting Sport Foundation that puts it out. People overwhelmingly approve of hunting for meat. Like, overwhelmingly approve it. And so we just need to capture that better and more and bring the non-hunter who supports their neighbor doing what they do. We just need to bring that whole bit into the fold more. And so that's kind of what we're hoping to do.
So what are you working on right now? Is there any story that you're working on that you're kind of tracking now that you're excited about?
Or is all the energy just going into the first issue i am well let's see so january kestrel and nicole will publish long reads so i'm working on our january newsletter right now and then i kind of have some loose plans i want to write a piece about mentorship i kind of have this like loose title in mind my mentors mentors that kind of just like looks at the the leapfrog of the game of leapfrog that can be like outdoor mentorship.
And then I also really want to write about how the newspaper scene broke the copper collar in Montana. That's kind of a deep, heady Montana topic, but just kind of the history of newspapers, independent newspapers in the state of Montana and what they accomplished in the political landscape there.
Otherwise i'm just kind of i don't know i just kind of churning and burning i have some some feature stories for some freelance opportunities coming up that i'm really excited about so, yeah that's all i can really say for now i guess nice how many articles do you work on at the same time do you have like six things that are that are on all the burners or do you try to get one or two things totally done before you take something else on it's i'm on quakey ground right now i
mean i'm still i'm still less than a year into being a freelancer and so i'm definitely. A lot of freelancers will talk about like the the feast and famine cycle, you know where you you're in a famine so you drum up a bunch of work as fast as possible and then it's all on the same timeline and so then you're feasting and you're working 12 hours a day to get everything done. And then you find yourself back in a famine again. So I'm kind of trying to balance that out right now.
December and January were definitely slow. I think, I don't know. I mean, I'm not really sure why that is. But yeah, I mean, I have a couple deadlines this month that I'm excited about.
So right now, I guess I have like four or five stories like in varying stages of complete like I you know one is still in the pitch phase one is basically drafted and ready to go out the door to require much heavier reporting and so I'm working actively reporting those two pieces, So it kind of, I guess it's just kind of, it changes on a day-to-day, month-by-month basis.
Cool. So in closing here, where can people go to sign up for, subscribe to, and get the Western both on Substack and then the newspaper? Is it included all that stuff? Where can people find your work and all that? So thewestern.com, that is T-H-E-W-E-S-T-R-N.com. So the newspaper is available through an annual subscription to our substack right now. We are also working on setting up a way for people to just buy subscriptions
to the newspaper and or to purchase individual copies. But that's kind of more a work in progress right now. Really, the best way that if you can ensure that your name is on our mailing list come April 1st is to subscribe to the Western through an annual subscription. We also offer a monthly subscription, but that currently is not a perk of the monthly subscription.
So if you're already subscribed, either as a free subscriber or a monthly subscriber, and you want to get the newspaper, best way to do it is just update your subscription. And then beyond that, we will still be on Substack. Our website is continuing forward, even with the newspaper. So yeah, just keep checking in there. And yeah, otherwise, I don't know, I guess my stuff is kind of here and there. I'm at Hilya with six L's on social media, but I'm not on there very frequently right now.
But my website's katiehillwriter.com if people are interested in what I'm up to. So yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. And looking forward to the first print edition. Awesome. Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it.