Another bone (or four) to pick with High Country News

And it's by far from the first. A clear sign of, not so much a love-hate relationship, but what these things really reflect —

A love-frustration relationship.

It is frustrating at times. I've let my subscription lapse once and am getting closer to letting it lapse again. (I've been a semi-regular subscriber for 15 or more years from now, more on the "regular" than the "semi.")

What has me hacked off this time?

Their annual photo contest, or more specifically, the announced winners and editor's choices.Per the first link, and a blurb below the slideshow at the second link, the contest was about the Western night sky, and more to the point, about issues with light pollution in the Western night sky.

I quote from the contest announcement at the first link:

Light pollution is an increasing issue across the West, but we think there are still places where the night skies are incredible. This year's photo contest will put that theory to the test. Send us your best pics of the Western night sky.

OK, with that said, I refer you back to the second link. Because HCN, even with an otherwise semi-antiquated website, strongly tut-tuts on others posting their photos, even by link showing the photo, I can't do that. I'll refer you to the photos by number.

And I can copy the captions, which helps.

No. 7: Desert Gold: In Joshua Tree National Park, light painting, plus overflow lights from Palm Springs in the far distance, make for a magical, golden image.

Light painting might violate the spirit of the contest. Having the fake alpenglow from an ever-more-bloated Palm Springs directly violates the spirt of the contest, in my opinion.

That one is the worst, but not the only.

No. 9:  Sprite Sky: The photographer had just passed through Kingman Ariz., when this large and distant electrical storm made its appearance. They managed to capture this and a dozen more "sprites." The green hue to the sky is due to the airglow that was present. The orange illumination in the clouds is light pollution from below.

Again the shooter, and the editor(s), glorify the light pollution, it seems, though not as much or as directly as in No. 7.

No. 11: Coyote Gulch: Polar star trails are captured from the floor of the Escalante Canyons of Southern Utah. Another camping party just downstream filled the canyon with light and music late into the evening.

Again, "filled the canyon with light," and the shooter deliberately cropped it INTO the picture and HCN seems to salute it.

Also, the "and music" seems to glorify noise pollution as well. That's even as a new piece at Atlantic decries the continuing loss of quiet spaces. and, Rainbow Bridge, near Escalante Canyons, is a proposed International Quiet Park. And, HCN has also written about THIS issue in relation to Olympic National Park and work by Gordon Hempton, founder of Quiet Parks International.

And, that's not all.

For other reason, we need to look at ...No. 8: At Joshua Tree: A quieter-than-usual Joshua Tree National Park during the federal government shutdown in January. Pictured here is the aptly-named Jumbo Rocks Campground.

My emphasis added.

Former NPS head John Jarvis said at the start of January that it was a mistake to leave any parks open. He cited overflowing bathroom sewage at Joshua Tree.

Lemme see, I think Joshua Tree was supposed to be SHUT DOWN then? Uhh, yes, unless photographer Matt Harding got in there before campgrounds there were shut, over these issues, unless he was only a day-tripper.

Since I don't know the details ... I'm not totally comfy with HCN choosing this picture either.

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Anyway, as noted, I'm moving closer and closer to not renewing my (digital-only) subscription when it is due for renewal. This is just another reason of several. Reposting old articles semi-regularly, even more when they're featury articles with no news-updates reasons to repost, is another. Killing online comments? I kind of get that, especially if your web content software is clunky, but it seemed to me to be a cop-out. Especially when they're non-responsive to my Tweets AND when staff has little interaction with commenters on HCN Facebook posts.

Their horrible handling of SJW Instagram influencers was the most recent previous goof. Part of the horror, besides the actual horror, was to learn that HCN doesn't run any online letters to the editor. (I never did flip through old PDF issues to see if it ran in print or not.)

The complaint before that was about killing onsite comments. (And I just thought of an issue related to that and to this current blog post. HCN says its website is too clunky to run moderation filters or do lots of other things. But, it's not too clunky to prevent me, with a Javascript window, from doing the old "copy link address" to show any of the photos I'm talking about above.)

And before that, it was a related, and bigger one — my idea that HCN, like national Democrats, tracked the Overton Window too much in a rightward editorial drift.

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In addition, about half of HCN's main stories, at least online, are co-published with folks like The Guardian's environmental desk, and thus, in many cases, paywall-free.

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Update, Nov. 27: I've gotten more emails from HCN in the last two weeks telling me my subscription is running out than I've gotten social media feedback in the last year or more on either positive or critical HCN story feedback.

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Update 2, Nov. 27: Is HCN's website really as clunky as I've heard more than once from staff? Seems hard to believe. It's non-clunky enough to keep people from either downloading or screengrabbing photos. It's non-clunky enough to have a hard paywall.

Seems like, on killing onsite comments, the website is non-clunky enough it could have made comments moderated. It was already spending staff time on ex post facto moderation, and a moderation system probably would have driven away some commenters. 

Or, per a suggestion of mine, I think the website is non-clunky enough that it could have limited commenting to subscribers.

That said, it's also non-clunky enough that a 2018 letter to the editor counts as a paywalled story.

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Update 3, Jan. 15, 2020: I forgot until now that HCN ran a piece last year conflating a carbon tax with cap and trade, and as usual, didn't respond to me on social media. Nor did the authors. Former HCN editor Jonathan Thompson is the only writer there to regularly engage with me, and invariably it's to defend not just his writing, but the magazine, as he did on the "rightward editorial drift" above.