Nicole Qualtieri - Charting a New Course in the Changing Landscape of Outdoor Media
Mountain & Prairie with Ed Roberson
Mountain & Prairie Media
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2025
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nicole Qualtieri is an outdoor writer and editor, a conservationist, and a committed outdoorswoman. Over the past decade, she's worked with some of the most notable brands in the outdoor industry, including MeatEater, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and GearJunkie, and she has bylines with many well-known outdoor publications, such as Outside, Modern Huntsman, and Backcountry Journal. But despite being plugged in with many of the best names in the outdoor business, she and a few creative friends decided to go out on a limb and start their own outdoor publication– one that focuses on substance over clickbait, depth and vulnerability over the silly quest for virality and search engine optimization.
The name of the project is The Westrn, and it combines the best parts of online writing and journalism with a printed, hold-it-in-your-hands newspaper that ships to subscribers four times per year. As you'll hear Nicole describe, the topics covered by The Westrn's include hunting, conservation, and a wide range of outdoor adventure. But the deeper point of it all is to build a tight-knit community of engaged outdoor enthusiasts of all stripes, who appreciate the value of nuanced writing, thinking, and publishing. As many legacy outdoor media brands have become controlled by private equity and now focus on scalability over creativity and quality, the role of people like Nicole and her partners at the Westrn are all the more important— they are taking a real risk to make the Westrn a reality, and I greatly admire their vision and commitment to action.
Nicole and I connected online– she was at her home in Anaconda, Montana and I was here in Colorado Springs– and we had an enlightening conversation filled with lots of laughs about her fascinating life, career, and the creation of The Westrn. We discussed her upbringing in what she describes as a high-control religious cult and how hunting and the outdoors were her way of working through some of that childhood trauma. We discussed her non-traditional career path, which included a stint as a stand-up comic, and how she worked her way into the outdoor industry. We discuss the importance of hard work, preparation, and grinding, and how self-confidence is generated from those activities. We discuss the current state of the outdoor media industry, the financial challenges of making it as a freelancer, her writing process, contentment vs happiness, favorite books, and of course, her goals for The Westrn.
Nicole was also kind enough to offer some discount codes for M&P listeners, so follow the appropriate links in the episode notes or on the website to get 20% off annual memberships to The Westrn and/or 20% off single issues of the print newspaper.
A huge thanks to Nicole for the conversation and thank you for listening. Enjoy!
---
- Nicole Qualtieri
- The Westrn
- 20% Discount off the Annual Subscription
- Link for M+P Listeners will auto-populate discount: https://www.thewestrn.com/mtnprairie
- 20% Off Pre-Order Single Issues:
- Use link to use code: https://thewestrnstore.com/discount/MTNPRAIRIE?redirect=%2Fproducts%2Fthe-westrn-individual-issue
- Or use code MTNPRAIRIE
- Ed's Book Recommendations
- Full episode notes and links: https://mountainandprairie.com/nicole-qualtieri/
---
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- 4:30 - Nicole and Ed's first convo (shared Roadhouse appreciation)
- 6:15 - Nicole's background
- 8:15 - How writing's been a part of Nicole's life
- 13:15 - Getting out West
- 16:30 - College degrees
- 19:15 - On writing On Killing Animals
- 21:00 - The grind and the craft
- 28:00 - Taking the pain
- 30:15 - Outside's rejection of On Killing Animals
- 34:45 - The corporatization of outdoor media
- 44:30 - The Westrn
- 54:30 - Taking a good idea and running with it
- 59:45 - Etymology of happy
- 1:02:30 - Nicole's book recs
- 1:07:00 - Parting words
---
ABOUT MOUNTAIN & PRAIRIE:
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, what's up everybody? Hope you all doing great. Quick announcement before we get started. |
| 0:04.0 | I wanted to make sure that you're all aware of my bimonthly book recommendations email. |
| 0:09.2 | For almost 10 years now, I've been sending out an email every other month with anywhere from |
| 0:15.3 | four to five up to eight books that I recently read and that I highly recommend. |
| 0:20.4 | The books are all over the |
| 0:21.8 | place as far as the subject goes and the genre and whether they're fiction or nonfiction. |
| 0:26.2 | They're generally not really about the American West, although there are a few in there |
| 0:30.1 | every now and then. But it's really just good books that I think are good and that I would like |
| 0:35.3 | to recommend to people. And I started out by sending the thing out to maybe like 20 or 30 of my friends in 2015. |
| 0:43.3 | And now the thing is grown and grown and grown. |
| 0:45.2 | And by my standards, there are a lot of people on the list. |
| 0:48.1 | And so people, for whatever reason, seem to enjoy the books that I recommend and my weird summaries of them. I think a lot of |
| 0:56.4 | people think is funny. But anyway, if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, there's no |
| 1:00.7 | sales pitches, there's no funny business, there's no like trickery with internet stuff. Seriously, |
| 1:06.2 | it's just an email that I send out with a bunch of books in it. No pressure to sign up, but if it |
| 1:10.6 | sounds like something you'd be interested in, |
| 1:12.7 | you can go to the link in the episode notes or go to |
| 1:16.2 | Mountainepray.com slash reading, and there's a link in there, a little box. |
| 1:19.9 | You put your email address in, and you'll be good to go. |
| 1:22.8 | Next one will come out towards the end of February. |
| 1:25.4 | Thanks so much. |
| 1:36.0 | Music come out towards the end of February. Thanks so much. This is the Mountain and Prairie podcast. I'm Ed Robertson. My guest today is Nicole |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mountain & Prairie Media, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Mountain & Prairie Media and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.