Copeland named to run WyoFile

Anne MacKinnon is the chair of WyoFile’s board

The governing board of WyoFile is delighted to announce that Matthew Copeland will be our new chief executive and editor, in charge of all of WyoFile’s operations.

Copeland has written and edited for WyoFile, most recently creating the series of short features, Wyoming Know-How. He is an insightful journalist and thoughtful observer of Wyoming in the twenty-first century.

In this new role he will run both the editorial and operational sides of WyoFile. This represents a change in WyoFile’s staff structure that we believe will clarify organizational leadership and help WyoFile advance our mission of delivering in-depth, non-partisan reporting on the people, places and policies of Wyoming.

Copeland brings nearly two decades of management, professional communications and community engagement experience to the role — more than half of it with Wyoming nonprofits. He is an award-winning writer who began his relationship with WyoFile as a freelance reporter, covering among other topics, the Wind River Indian Reservation.

In the first half of 2016 he served as WyoFile’s interim editor and was instrumental in rapidly expanding both readership and the WyoFile community.

A native of Charlottesville Virginia, Copeland studied as a Howard Hughes Scholar of the Life Sciences and competed as a student athlete at Penn State. Then, as he puts it, he “served a six year corporate sentence in the internet technology industry.” Upon “escape” he found his way home to Wyoming where he met his wife, settled in Lander, started a family and has been thoroughly ruined for a life lived anywhere else.

Copeland describes himself as an avid hunter, angler and wild-country junkie who believes that facts matter, that integrity is non negotiable, and that nothing is as powerful as a good story well told.

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