Former Top Outside Editor Launches Public Lands Media Watchdog – Adventure Journal

Congratulations are in order.

Thank you. Yeah, I don’t know if it’s congratulations quite yet, but at least I got it out into the world.

Well, that’s kind of the big deal. Then you’re committed. I remember when I went to Outdoor Retailer the first day and told people I was going to do AJ in print. At the end of the day, I thought, “Oh, my god, what did I just do?”

That’s exactly what I was saying to my wife yesterday, because I keep saying, if this doesn’t work out, you know, I can do this, but now that I’ve started raising money, people are actually giving me dollars, I can’t believe it. I’m stuck now.

Yeah, you’re pretty well in it. So, tell me what RE:PUBLIC is.

RE:PUBLIC is an independent, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to exclusively covering public lands issues. That’s our sole focus. We won’t be writing about anything else.

Why do you think it’s important and why now?

Well, we have 630 million acres of public lands that have been such a rich part of our history and are hopefully going to be part of our future. There are all kinds of management implications that need to be discussed and debated going forward. Right now is a critical time because the threats are unprecedented, but even in an administration where the conservation movement isn’t playing as much defense, there are plenty of other issues to debate when it comes to these lands. And then you combine that with the fact that we’ve seen massive contraction across media in the last two decades.

One of the statistics I cite is there’s 75 percent fewer journalists working in America today than there were two decades ago. And so the media is overwhelmed, and especially right now, the issues going on with public lands are like the 18th most important topic for the national media to cover. They’re just overwhelmed by everything that’s out there. So, my theory is we just need more journalists covering this space in particular.

It’s really important to me. It’s really important to the outdoor industry that I’ve been part of for 25 years. And while there are definitely pockets of great coverage of this, you know, High Country News does great work, there’s a Substack called Public Domain. They’re doing excellent work, but I would argue with anybody until I’m blue in the face that we don’t have enough journalists covering this important topic, and so that’s what we’re trying to stand up.

Do any of the major outlets have a public lands desk or even dedicated reporter?

Not that I’m aware of, and I did a lot of research when I was going into this. What’s encouraging is the major outlets all have a climate desk, and I think the US media is really well stocked now with those outlets and journalists covering climate change—as it should be. That is the biggest issue of our time, in my opinion.

But there is no dedicated public land desk that I’m aware of. I think High Country News is considering standing one up themselves, but I’m not aware of any others, and that’s why I saw a great niche here.

How long have you been working on the idea? Where did it come from?

Well, when I left Outside [in February 2025], I took a month to decompress because there had been a lot of years of grinding. And the question I was really asking myself was, is there still a place for me in media and journalism? I feel like it’s been two decades with the universe telling me that this is not a comfortable or secure job choice.

And I’ve been ignoring it for a long time, so that was the first thing for me. And then I had worked at Texas Monthly under a guy named Evan Smith, who’s kind of my mentor. He founded the Texas Tribune, which is a nonprofit model, and so I’d always been curious about the model, and I think around March, this idea started gestating of, you know, maybe I could start a nonprofit and get out of the commercial media roller coaster.

And I started doing research and got more and more fascinated by the space and the model and saw that there were quite a few entities that are national in scope, but just single-topic oriented. And that’s when it hit me that public lands were an issue that I cared deeply about. And I also know from my many years at Outside that some of our coverage of public lands issues, especially during the first Trump administration, were incredibly popular stories. And so I know there’s an audience for it.

So when this started, literally April 1st, I said, “I’m gonna give myself the month of April to come up with a business plan.” And if by the end of April, I feel like there’s something there, I’m gonna go for it. And so that’s how it happened. That’s really accelerated.

I know how you spent your summer.

Sometimes I’ve amazed myself at what I’ve accomplished at this point. But yeah, I definitely need to raise some more money so I can get some more help.

Tell me about that. It’s a nonprofit. Nonprofits spend so much energy just fundraising. Where do you expect the money to come from? What are the opportunities for funding nonprofit newsrooms?

So as a nonprofit—and just to back up and not to get too much in the weeds—when you’re a nonprofit, you file for nonprofit status at the federal level, for 501(c)(3) status. And I was told very early on that I can expect that to take at least a year and maybe more under this administration.

So the workaround for that is to get a fiscal sponsor. And a fiscal sponsor is an existing 501(c)(3) that can take tax-deductible dollars and that’s sort of a pass-through to your organization. So I’m fiscally sponsored by an entity called the Institute for Nonprofit News, and they have 500 member organizations now, so it gives you a sense of how much the space is exploding. Part of the rules of the fiscal sponsorship and being a member of INN is that you disclose where you’re getting your money.

Screengrab from RE:PUBLIC’s website home page.

Do you have any expectations that brands in the outdoor industry will contribute?

I do. I have made a conscious choice to get onto a solid foundation before I go to brands, because even with brand support in the nonprofit base, there is a transactional quality to it. And having been in commercial media for so long, I want to make sure that I’m on firm footing before I go after those dollars so that we remain as independent a news organization as possible.

Where we’re headed is that I won’t be the editor in chief of this organization. I will be hiring my counterpart, and I’ll be building the business. And that’s important to me because so much of my job will be raising money. Especially when you get to the family foundations or the larger foundations, they all have a pet cause, and some of them might say, “Chris, how are you going to cover this, you know, issue X?” And I need to be able to say, “Well, that’s not ultimately my decision. That’s the editorial team side.”

So it’s a little bit like a publisher-editor relationship. And so that’s how I want to set it up for the long term, because I think that’s really important for our independence. It’s also going to make those conversations a little easier.

How do Americans feel about public lands?

There’s quite a few surveys done annually that poll both nationally and Western voters. And what you see is a super majority of voters and a bipartisan coalition that really believe public land should stay in public hands and that there shouldn’t be any downsizing of, say, the monuments that we currently have.

So there’s a broad support for conservation. When we cover public lands, we want to do it from a bipartisan perspective, because we think this is a rare opportunity to speak to both sides of the aisle on an issue people care about. But we also come with two priors.

One is that we believe that climate change is real and that it’s human-caused. And so we’re not gonna step back in our stories and say, on the one hand, some people believe climate change is human-caused and others don’t. We consider that a settled matter. And then the other would be that the recreation industry and recreation considerations, along with conservation, haven’t had an equal seat at the table when making management decisions.

And when we talk about this bipartisan coalition, I don’t think it’s super strong yet. It’s a very loose coalition. But that’s been one of the issues for many, many decades—that the outdoor industry is a huge, $1.2 trillion industry, but it’s fragmented into tons and tons of user groups that don’t always necessarily speak with one voice.

And that is what I think is gonna be critical going forward.

Other than reporting in a nonpartisan way on the issues, do you see an activist role for RE:PUBLIC? Do you see an opinion-oriented, position-oriented role? Or do you feel you have a commitment to maintain as much objectivity as you can on these issues and cover as many perspectives as you can?

Well, we’re not an advocacy group, so we’re not out there trying to trumpet a single issue or protect a certain set of acres. I guess the best example I could give is, over the summer, when Mike Lee, Senator Mike Lee from Utah, proposed his huge sell-off plan, it galvanized this outdoor recreation community. One of his rationales was that this could be a fix for our housing crisis. And I think it’s the advocacy group’s role to say, “We don’t care. We want to protect every acre that we have.” And that was sort of the rallying cry, you know, “We’ll protect every acre.”

I think our role as a journalistic entity is more to investigate that idea—could selling some public lands be a solution for our housing crisis?—and to look at all sides of that and then come down on one or the other, but not to dismiss it out of hand, that’s not our role as journalists.

It does sound like a fundamental principle is the defense of public lands. Is that a fair statement?

Yes. And defense can mean a lot of things. We’re not fundamentally opposed to any extractive industries. But I do think that we have to balance use on these lands, and we come with a perspective that these lands need to be preserved for the long term, and not for short-term gain. And so that would be our perspective.

Do you feel that a lot of what you’re covering is going to be negative, and do you wonder whether people are going to be responsive to it? Is that something you’ve thought about in your coverage?

I’d say I think about it every day, because I know from my time at Outside that if you don’t come up with a compelling narrative in a story that’s at the center of what you’re talking about, there’s gonna be audience fatigue. And so, what we always focused on during my time at Outside and what I really believe in is finding those narratives. Even if it’s a negative story, if there’s a compelling narrative at the center, people will read it.

And I can’t pretend to tell you what this organization and what our editorial strategy is going to look like five years from now, because, like all business startups, it’s going to evolve. But at our core, our first year is to fund 10 to 12 feature-length investigative stories that are compelling and will have impact. And so, I’m not gonna tell you every one of those stories is gonna be a home run, but my feeling is less is more in this space and to focus on big, high-impact stories versus just covering the daily drip of bad news coming out of this administration or the next one.

I noticed 27 percent of your budget is set aside for story fees, but 4 percent for photography. It’s such a visual world. Do you see that ratio shifting?

Yeah, you’re probably looking at my blind spot, to be honest with you. I have always had such an admiration for photographers, and I know how much at Outside they made our stories better. And for some reason, because I come from the word side, I always overemphasize the word. I was wondering about that flaw in my business model and I will cop to it and say I do know how much photographers can elevate a story and I didn’t stick to my guns and make sure that we set aside more money for that.

You’re based in the West. There are far larger parcels of public land in the West. Public lands in the East tend not to get as much coverage. What are your plans for achieving balance there—if you feel like you need to achieve balance?

I’m wrestling with that right now, to be completely honest with you. One of the things that is becoming clear is that on the foundation side, there are tons of foundations that have a focus on the environment or conservation, and then there are quite a few foundations now that support journalism. But there are more that support local journalism than national single-topic journalism. So there are some funders who are pushing me to be more regional and maybe define our audience as the West.

And so that’s something that I’m wrestling with right now. But part of my theory is that most of our media is centered on the East Coast. And I think that there’s a lack of understanding about the importance of public lands to people who live in the West and how we interact and come into contact with these lands, literally on a daily basis. And so these issues are always top of mind in a way that they just aren’t on the East Coast. And so I think it’s important for this entity to be situated in the West, even if there are, like you say, there are a lot of public lands on the East, too. The bulk of them, where these real issues come to a head, are out west.

Thanks so much for the time, Chris. Kudos. And best of luck.

Well, thank you. And I’ll put you down for $50,000.