"It was March 2025, a little over a month after Outside Magazine had laid Keyes off as editor-in-chief. He'd been at Outside since 2007. "I really thought I was done with journalism, just because it's been such a roller coaster," he told me. But still, in the back of his mind, he had the germ of an idea for a newsroom dedicated to covering public lands."
"At the end of the trip Keyes and his wife and daughter drove out to Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, a few hours from their home in Santa Fe, and when they reached they found a large group of people milling around outside the visitor center. It was closed because of cuts by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, and that, says Keyes "was the aha moment." Five months later, Re:Public was born."
Chris Keyes founded Re:Public after being laid off from Outside Magazine. The idea emerged during a backpacking trip in March 2025, when a closed visitor center at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument—shuttered because of cuts by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency—served as an "aha" moment. Re:Public is modeled on single-subject nonprofit outlets like The Trace and The Marshall Project and will focus on national coverage of public lands and waters. The United States contains about 660 million acres of public lands and waters, roughly 630 million federal and 30 million state. The newsroom plans to report widely across that territory amid debates over land sales and environmental rollbacks.
Read at Nieman Lab
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]