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A Welcome Letter From Our Publisher

This Land Press is proud to launch The Pickup.

Ryan McGahan|

From left to right: Z.B. Reeves, Matt Carney, Alicia Chesser and Vincent LoVoi.

Dear Readers:

Welcome home. And please welcome us home too.

This Land Press is proud to launch a new imprint, The Pickup, that will bring a fresh eye to Tulsa with the same courage, savvy, and critical insight as This Land did from 2010 through 2016. With This Land, we hit a motherlode, finding stories that were enlightening, funny, terrifying, insightful, and often profoundly moving. All of our work with This Land, I hope, deepened our readers’ understanding of and appreciation for this place. Tulsa. The middle of America. This land.

With The Pickup, we hope to do the same and give you even more to think about. There are plenty of untold stories still here. The Pickup will be an online subscription-based magazine that features a wide range of voices. It will be forward-looking, with an editorial mix blending local commentary with community-oriented journalism and feature stories, as well as weekly roundups of Tulsa food, music, arts, cultural events, and local news from the middle of America.

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Seven years ago, we announced that This Land Press would take a publishing hiatus and focus its energies on other projects. My letter then explained our thinking. It also explained what we stand for and why we’d return. In short, what we stand for is this: that creative individuals in the middle of America need a strong, shared home base to unapologetically tell stories that might not fit into conventional pathways.

These stories still need to be told. So we spent the past few years exploring how to meet this need in a more sustainable, focused, and creative way. During this hiatus, many friends, subscribers, writers, and others would ask when we would resume publishing. My standard reply was that we would when the right person with the right vision walked in my door. Well, that person showed up.

Matt Carney is the right person at the right time to lead The Pickup.

Matt spent the past six years leading an editorial project called Root Tulsa. In that role he experimented with audiences, explored the gaps in Tulsa’s media coverage and built a large list of weekly newsletter readers. And when Root’s future became uncertain, Matt and his team did not want to stop publishing. 

After months of discussion, we decided to go forward and launch a fresh imprint. This Land Press acquired Root’s assets to combine with This Land so that The Pickup will have as many tools as possible for success. Matt’s note here tells you more about his team and vision.

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When we went on hiatus the noise on the internet was overwhelming. Valuable time and talent at This Land was spent trying to appeal to opaque social media algorithms. We all now see the algorithms were always out of control. Artificial intelligence — both in social media and pseudo-journalism — is already choking on its own tail. We believe this moment might be an opportunity to return to the fundamentals of journalism: quality storytelling about a place that readers care about.  

That’s the gamble we’re taking. It’s a leap. And we hope you’ll jump with us. We can’t offer “free” but as we all now know, free never was. Privacy went first and now we’re flooded with robot-generated internet kudzu that has little to do with the lives we’re living. All the while, little old Tulsa keeps chugging along, as interesting as ever, and perhaps even more interesting than before. It’s this land. It still fascinates. Its past is only now being discussed honestly, its present is changing faster than ever and its future is up to us to define. 

We’re proud to launch The Pickup, and are excited to get started. But as we move forward, we also acknowledge the work of the people who helped produce This Land, including Michael Mason, Mark Brown, Natasha Ball, Holly Wall, Kathryn Parkman, Jeff Martin, Sterlin Harjo, Matt Leach, and Courtney Campbell; and a special thanks to Stuart Hetherwood and Ryan McGahan who nurtured the projects of This Land Press during our print hiatus and are part of the new adventure ahead.

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So, why the name change? The name is new because the publication is, well, new. We’re proud of This Land and will keep its great work alive and accessible to you on the new Pickup website. Yet we felt a fresh name would help breathe new life into our project. The word “pickup” captures so many characteristics of Tulsa: trucks, electric guitars, radio airwaves, hitchhikers on Route 66. And it captures Tulsa’s new spirit, too: moving forward, repairing, lifting up.

This Land Press will continue to take on ad hoc endeavors such as book publishing, film productions, television series, podcasts, innovative retail products, photography, and partnerships. The Pickup has already found fellow traveler publications in the Twin Cities, Austin, Brooklyn and elsewhere, forging alliances through knowledge-sharing.

We will always care first about your experience, as a reader.

As we launch, we ask you to do three things. First, subscribe. Second, know with certainty that more is ahead and what you see now is the tip of the iceberg. And third, dive in. Think, talk, mull and ponder these stories and ideas from Tulsa’s creative community. 

Thanks for being part of what lies ahead. Tulsa has an extraordinary community of talented writers, thinkers, and creators. Let’s listen to what they have to say.

If you liked this story, please share it! Your referrals help The Pickup reach new readers, and they'll be able to read a few articles for free before they encounter our paywall.

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