For a decade now Betsy Marston and her husband, Ed, have published High Country News out of a remodeled feed store in blink-and-you'll-miss-it Paonia, Colorado. During that time the paper has won top awards for environmental reporting and added readers in every state, some 12,000 in all, up from 3,000 when they took it over. Governmental agencies like the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management route office copies to dozens of employees, and influential western politicians like Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and Colorado Representative Pat Schroeder are longtime subscribers.

Not bad for a couple of New Yorkers.

The Marstons met at the student newspaper at the City College of New York. After they married, in 1966, Ed taught college physics and wrote a textbook; Betsy became New York's first woman news anchor, on public television station WNET. But in 1974 they decided to leave the hectic life of the city for a year to spend time with their young children in a cabin they owned in Colorado.

"When we got to Colorado we couldn't handle leisure for long," Betsy Marston recalls. "Ed got a job writing environmental impact statements for the Forest Service and I made candles. We were bored and decided to start a paper."

Two papers, actually, one local and one regional, both based in Paonia (the regional paper folded; the local paper was sold). Then, in 1983 -- "the worst year of my life," Betsy says -- the Marstons took over publication of High Country News, which had been founded in 1970 by Tom Bell, an environmental journalist and rancher. "It was on the brink of disaster," Betsy says. "But it had loyal readers. During the first couple of years Ed and I took turns paying each other a salary of $ 11,000. Often we put the children to sleep in the building while we finished the paper. In the beginning, it was just Ed and me."

High Country News these days covers ten western states in sixteen pages. It relies on a full-time staff of eight, a network of more than 100 free-lancers, and three to five interns to produce the biweekly paper. So far, more than 100 interns have spent three months each volunteering for the paper, researching and writing articles on complex issues like community development and western water rights. "I like to think we're seeding the West with environmental reporters," Betsy says. The paper covers public land issues, water rights, electricity, and grazing. Two series have been published as books -- Western Water Made Simple (1987) and Reopening The Western Frontier (1989). A recent issue on grazing covered both sides of the complicated issue, with articles like THIS RANCHER STICKS TO BIOLOGY and WILDERNESS AND CATTLE DON'T MIX, which helps explain why the paper has broadened its readership to include ranchers, miners, and loggers, as well as environmentalists.

This summer a High Country News admirer who died of asthma left the paper $ 300,000 to use as the Marstons see fit. They plan to use some of the money to publish more books and possibly to develop a radio program.

The paper is not without its critics. "I read through it, but not religiously," says Dave Mehlhaff, communications director for the National Cattlemen's Association. "It's a pretty good publication, but it has moved more to the left in recent years. There are more environmental and animal rights' viewpoints."

Gary McVicker, a Bureau of Land Management official, sees a swing in another direction: "In the past, they mainly garnered support from the environmental movement, but now they are swinging towards finding solutions to problems. That's positive reporting."

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