Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include a statement from the Spokane Editorial Society, a union for the Spokesman-Review’s newsroom and editorial staff.
Rob Curley, the long-time executive editor of the Spokesman-Review, has been placed on administrative leave following the paper’s comprehensive coverage of the Spokane Complex wildfires.
The newspaper has commissioned an independent investigation into his conduct, according to Bill Simer, the board chair of the Comma Community Journalism Lab, which Curley established to help convert for-profit news outlets into nonprofits.
Curley’s leave was imposed after a verbal altercation in the newsroom Friday, August 7, over coverage of the fires, said Simer, a retired accountant. He described it as an “investigation into a potential human personnel issue.”
Simer said Curley asked him to call RANGE, but added that he could not offer further details on the dispute because he wasn’t in the room that Friday to witness the conflict.
The working relationship between an editor and a reporter is “a hard relationship,” Simer said.
“I do think it was a situation where professional conflict was high,” Simer said of the fire coverage, though he could not offer details about the nature of any conflict in the newsroom. But he did say, “I’d heard of people who had worked three days with very little sleep.”
In the past week, two Spokesman reporters wrote highly personal articles about the devastating fires. Thomas Clouse tracked down the firefighter who saved Clouse’s neighbor’s house. Alexandra Duggan turned in a lengthy first-person narrative about her experience during the fire, including references to her faith.
In text messages with RANGE, Duggan referred all questions about Curley to the Spokesman publisher Stacey Cowles.
Cowles — president of the Cowles Company’s media division, part of one of the most powerful businesses in the history of Spokane — has been Curley’s boss for many years. Cowles did not return an interview request sent Monday evening from RANGE.
Clouse is the current president of the Spokane Editorial Society, the union that represents the rank-and-file newsroom employees. He told RANGE on Monday night that the union was preparing a statement, but did not share it with RANGE until after we had published.
Simer said that after the dispute in the newsroom, Curley left the Spokesman’s facilities located at 999 W Riverside Ave and later could not get back in, said Simer, who praised the team’s extensive coverage of the fire.
On Monday night, the union approved a vote of no confidence for Curley, according to a union statement released to RANGE shortly after this article’s initial publication Tuesday evening.
“While we acknowledge the results of the no confidence vote, the circumstances behind it are part of an ongoing personnel matter,” Clouse wrote in the release. “Out of respect to those processes, we cannot comment further at this time.”
The release also clarified that the vote does not reflect the union’s relationship with the Cowles Publishing Company or Comma — effectively saying the no-confidence vote extends to Curley’s leadership and not the larger project of making the Spokesman a non-profit.
Curley wasn’t the only person prevented from coming to the Spokesman offices. Simer said Cowles asked all the Comma employees to work from home to “preserve the independence” of the investigation into Curley, Simer said.
Curley launched Comma, which sports a leadership staff of 10, in 2023 to run several programs, from the local journalism the Spokesman produces to community labs in partnerships with local universities.
In 2025, the Cowles family announced it would donate the Spokesman to Comma to operate as the lab’s flagship paper — with Curley serving as Comma’s president. Comma also runs the Black Lens, a newspaper serving Black readers across the region. The transfer was contingent on Comma raising a $2 million community match, which it met in May 2026.
Right now, the newspaper and Comma are in a transition period. The exact nature of that transition has been messy, and from the outside, it’s not entirely clear to RANGE who has authority over what in the newsroom. What is clear is that there are some number of staffers officially working for Comma, while others work for the Spokesman.
Curley became the Spokesman’s editor in 2016, after being ousted from the Orange County Register, another prominent regional paper. The year after he arrived, Spokane’s daily saw a round of staff buyouts, followed by another round the next year. In 2020, it suspended the print run of its Saturday paper.
He drew criticism in 2021 after accepting an invitation from US Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers to be her guest at President Joe Biden’s inauguration — even as she was refusing interview requests from the Spokesman’s reporters.
Still, at a time when newspapers have lost relevance in many cities, Curley sought to uplift the Spokesman as an outlet that deeply engaged with its community. At the Spokesman, Curley started the Northwest Passages events series, which hosts community conversations with authors, and a paid high school internship.
Curley has touted Comma as an important part of saving local journalism, though, in its 2024 tax filings, Comma ended its year with net negative assets and a deficit of over $118,000.
Simer said he spoke with Cowles Tuesday morning, and the publisher told him the Spokesman is committed to the relationship it’s starting to form with Comma and to becoming a community nonprofit newspaper.
We will update this story if more information becomes available.
