The new publication, from former Outside Magazine EIC Chris Keyes, will focus on longform stories about the 660 million acres of public lands and waters in the U.S.

Chris Keyes dreamed up his new publication, fittingly, while he was on a backpacking trip.

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. “And backpacking is a wonderful way to work through thought exercises. So I had a lot of time to think on it.”

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 Efficiency1, and that, says Keyes “was the aha moment.” Five months later, Re:Public was born.

Re:Public is inspired by single-subject nonprofit news sites like The Trace and The Marshall Project, and like them has a specialized focus area with national scope. The United States contains 660 million acres of public lands and waters; around 630 million acres are controlled by the federal government and 30 million are controlled by states. Re:Public (the name is a play on words; it will publish stories regarding the public lands of this republic) plans to find stories on as much of that land as possible.

Between (failed, for now) attempts to sell millions of acres of public land and rollbacks of environmental protections, it’s an interesting time to be covering public lands, and Keyes knows from his experience at Outside that people are interested in stories about them. During the first Trump administration, when he was still at Outside, Keyes saw interest in stories about public lands shoot up for two reasons: First, the administration was trying to strip protections from areas that had been previously protected, like the Bears Ears National Monument, and second, people spent more time outside during the pandemic. Keyes isn’t the only person who’s noticed that interest; SFGATE launched a national parks bureau in January, and it was driving 12% percent of the site’s traffic by June.

“So much of our coverage will depend on what administration is in power and what their agenda is [for public lands],” Keyes told me. Right now, “there are unprecedented threats being thrown around, like privatization and selling off public lands. I would characterize a lot of our coverage of that as defense, from a conservationist point of view, and that’s going to inform a lot of our coverage. But what I try to stress to people is that even in another administration, whether Republican or Democrat, there are a lot of issues to explore then too.”

To many people, the most familiar kind of public land is a national park. But public lands are far bigger than parks. The U.S. Geological Survey’s map of public lands reveals a hodgepodge of agencies that control much of the land in the West and Alaska, including the Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation, Parks, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and even the Defense and Energy Departments.

The largest of these landowners is the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, which is the sort of agency that most urban dwellers don’t think about unless something goes wrong. But it’s a vital part of the agricultural economy of the mountain west, controlling vast swathes of ranchland used by grazing livestock, which also makes it controversial. (“Go into any bar in a ranching town and ask people what they think about BLM,” a rancher in Idaho once told me, “and you’ll probably start a fight.”) The 2016 occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by a group of right-wing militants, for example, was driven in part by resentment toward the federal government and in particular the BLM and its grazing fees.

Which is all to say that public land is a topic with far-reaching implications. Keyes told me that while Re:Public’s coverage will be non-partisan, because he wants to reach as wide an audience as possible, its journalism will be “informed by a few priors,” namely that human-caused climate change is real and that “the outdoor recreation economy is a hugely important part of our overall economy, and needs to be factored in when making decisions long term about how we use these lands.”

The oil and gas industry, Keyes said, tends to “speak with one voice,” even though it’s made up of multiple competing companies. The outdoor recreation industry, on the other hand, is made up of disparate groups engaging in different activities. Even though they might all be making use of the same land, they tend to identify only with other people engaging in their chosen activity. Hunters, fishers, climbers, hikers, and mountain bikers, for example, all identify as those things rather than as, say, “outdoor recreationists.” Keyes hopes Re:Public can help close that gap, even if the people in those groups might have different politics more broadly.

“I can’t name many other issues with bipartisan support other than this idea that public lands should stay in public hands, broadly speaking,” Keyes said; he pointed to a YouGov survey of 4,000 Americans commissioned by the Trust for Public Land that showed 71% of Americans oppose the sale of public lands. “I’m trying to be really thoughtful about how we tell our stories and pick our topics so that we’re not out of the gate seen as another left-wing conservationist organization, but an organization that cares about public lands and that speaks to [everyone]. I think that’s an opportunity that very few media outlets have right now.”

Most of the stories Re:Public publishes will be photo and text-heavy longform narratives or investigations — Keyes is aiming for 10 to 12 stories published in the first year, each of which is “designed to have high impact and drive conversations” — along with weekly newsletters, podcasts, and interactive data projects. Every story Re:Public publishes in its first year will be co-published with a partner publication. Its first feature, a story where three writers spent the summer assessing conditions at three different national parks, will be co-published by Outside Magazine, which Keyes says should help build an audience. (“No one appreciates being laid off,” he told me, “but I still want the [Outside] brand to succeed, and I love the idea of our first assignment being one that supports their legacy of publishing deeply reported longform journalism.”)

Keyes also plans to use “shoulder content” on social media, like video interviews with his writers, to drive engagement, though he said he’s trying to be “super intentional about how we show up in those places.” Re:Public is also using Stacker media, a distribution tool that allows nonprofits to publish one or two stories per month for free, to distribute its content.

As a nonprofit, Re:Public is primarily dependent on donations for its operations (the Institute for Nonprofit News is its fiscal sponsor), and the majority of its funding so far has come from private donors and a few small reader donations. Keyes plans to pursue foundations for more funding, and is also looking into diversifying Re:Public’s revenue streams with event programming. For now, he is the only full-time staff member, but he hopes to raise $500,000 in the first year and somewhere in the ballpark of $1.25 million for the second and third years, all of which he says should help him expand the team beyond the freelancers he’s contracted for the publication’s first slate of stories.

For now, and probably for the foreseeable future, Re:Public is going to stay a little scrappy. But Keyes is used to that; it’s sort of the nature of outdoor recreation.

And, he said, it’s far from his first time seeing public lands in a tight spot. Back in 1996, when Keyes was in college, he and a friend drove down to the Grand Canyon from Portland, Oregon, camping on BLM land along the way. Unbeknownst to them, the government was in the midst of a shutdown that happened to lift on the day they reached the park.

“So we walked up and said we want to hike down to the bottom of the canyon,” Keyes said, “and they told us the ranch was open.”

Phantom Ranch, which is usually booked years in advance and runs a lottery system for dormitory beds, had cleared its guest books, not knowing when the shutdown would lift. Keyes and his friend walked right in.

Picture of cows that graze on BLM lands by Neel Dhanesha

1. At the time of publication, Gila Cliffs is closed again due to the government shutdown. [↩]