Bryan Welch

Publisher and Editorial Director, Ogden Publications

“I believe that magazines like Mother Earth News and Natural Home have been successful because they focus on cool stuff you can do. Not about the dire consequences of technology. Not about impending doom. They are optimistic journals of personal action. And they are not dogmatic. We figure there’s a long continuum of personal action. At one end, there are folks who grow all their own food and bicycle everywhere they go. At the other end of the continuum folks are considering maybe switching to organic milk. We find excitement at both ends of this continuum.”

On any given day, it is not out of the question to find Bryan Welch spending his early morning hours tending to his cattle on his farm near Lawrence, Kansas, his lunchtime polishing an essay for Utne Reader at his Topeka office and his evening at a Hollywood cocktail reception for the launch of a green media initiative.

Welch and his family raise cattle, sheep, goats and chickens on their 50-acre farm. All their animals range freely and the grazing animals are strictly grass-fed. He grew up in New Mexico where, starting at age 9, he cared for a neighbor’s dairy goats and other livestock.
 
When he’s not farming, Welch runs Ogden Publications, Inc., (www.ogdenpubs.com), a diversified media, consulting and affinity marketing company. His company has grown rapidly over the past few years and now publishes 10 magazines for people interested in self-sufficiency, sustainability, rural lifestyle and farm-collectible categories, including Mother Earth News, Utne Reader, Natural Home, and the Herb Companion. Their websites, including the groundbreaking carbon-offset shopping site, www.EarthMoment.com, are growing exponentially and currently attract more than 1 million unique visitors each month. They also publish books and market insurance and financial services to their subscribers, and provide companies of all sizes with strategic consulting services on marketing to the green-focused consumer. About a third of their gross revenue comes from these ancillary marketing programs.

Before starting Ogden Publications in 1996, Welch was for 19 years a reporter, photographer, editor and publisher of newspapers in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Washington and Connecticut. He holds a master’s degree from Harvard University where he studied media policy and media management at the Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Business School.

Welch currently is a member of the Magazine Publishers of America board of directors, the Kansas Land Trust board of directors and the Down Home Ranch Foundation board of directors. He is chairman of the Independent Magazine Advisory Group within the Magazine Publishers of America.

For more information on Bryan, please visit www.ogdenpubs.com