Hey, it’s Luke,
I have a feeling this whole “March Matchness” fundraiser conceit feels cute and fun to some of our readers and many others don’t necessarily care about sports but understand the reference. There’s definitely a third group that wishes Spokane didn’t get so damn basketball-focused every spring for a few weeks.
Today, I want to share a story that I think will appeal to all of you: a Cinderella story from Spokane that has nothing to do with basketball.
I feel a little bashful doing this because the story is RANGE.
I hope more than anything that the work we do here is a meaningful part of your life. It’s surreal for me to say this, but RANGE is also a meaningful part of a national conversation about how to better deliver local news.
Here’s a quick example: in fall 2022, I attended a large journalism conference in Austin, Texas with hundreds of people from all over the country. It was a big enough event that the former executive editor of the New York Times gave the opening keynote.
I knew like 15 people.
Immediately after the keynote, feeling honestly tiny compared to other teams in attendance, I went to a session about innovative newsrooms, hoping to learn something from those other places. Wildly, out of the five examples offered from across the US, RANGE’s worker-owned model was one. I went from feeling completely anonymous to having a lot of people really wanting to learn more.
That moment made me reflect: little signals like this had been happening since almost the beginning of RANGE (get ready for a little back story) and continue to happen (big props to our beloved Val Osier immediately to follow).
Like all good Cinderella stories, RANGE has a fairy godmother. His name is Ryan Pitts.
Ryan is a guy who, mostly behind the scenes, facilitated some of the most innovative stuff the Spokesman-Review did in the aughts and early teens. For the last decade or so, he has been — still mostly behind the scenes — helping facilitate important national conversations about building a more equitable future for journalism and journalists.
I started RANGE in April 2020 as a podcast that I hoped would get Spokane talking. Having left the Inlander almost eight years earlier, I also wanted to know if I, personally, still had a place in journalism.
Ryan convinced me RANGE was doing something special — not just different for Spokane, but different even than most other news projects in the US. More than that, though, he seriously hinted — in his kind, supportive way — that I kinda owed it to Spokane to think bigger and push harder.
He was telling me, basically, to try and play with the big kids.
He wasn’t subtle about it either, sending me grant, fellowship and business opportunities. He convinced me to put RANGE in for a hyper-competitive journalism business bootcamp — a tournament of sorts! — that I, for a number of reasons, thought we had no chance of being invited to.
But Ryan, as he often does, knew something I didn’t.
Out of hundreds of early stage newsrooms across the US, Puerto Rico and Canada, RANGE made the cut and we got to spend a few months learning alongside 24 of the most inspiring people I’ve ever been around.
About a year later, Pitts convinced me to apply for another super-long-shot fellowship opportunity. We won that, too, and that’s how RANGE was able to hire Val.
Today, RANGE is 6 times bigger and a roughly one million times more clear-eyed about our mission than we were at the end of our first year, 2020. We’re still young, and have so much more to grow, but already I believe we have done reporting that has changed the conversation around some of the biggest and most important issues facing our region in the last few years and launched a really meaningful newsletter to more deeply connect our readers with what is going on in the halls of power every week. In November, we became the smallest urban area, by far, to launch a Documenters satellite, with the goal of eventually “putting every meeting on the public record.” This week we’re going to start testing a new end-of-week roundup — and we’re building it in real time, as part of an effort to give our readers more input into the work we put out into the world.
The sky, from here, is the limit.
And because of who we have around us, I cannot wait to keep ascending those heights.
[Here’s where smart fundraisers would tell me to put the obligatory ask for money, but to save us both from that, I’ll just leave a link to our membership page.]
Most importantly, though, like a certain sports team from a certain school I am consciously not naming: as RANGE keeps piling on wins year after year, it’s our younger team members who are stepping up to make big impacts and define what leadership looks like for them, and for the whole team.
Which brings me to our most recent big, national win.
Earlier this week — once again out of hundreds of applicants — RANGE’s very own Val Osier was announced as one of 25 people invited into the inaugural Emerging News Leadership Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. (Despite being named after the guy who made it easier to sell the snow tires from your old Camry, the Newmark school is doing cutting-edge work in journalism.)
And so, like that team we won’t name, those early successes weren’t a fluke. The wins keep coming.
I truly hope that’s something every person reading this feels very proud of, because everyone reading this has contributed to what we’re building here. Even if you only open every 4th email and you only ever lurk on Reddit, you’re part of this, and it wouldn’t be the same without you.
I’ll leave it there and finally get around to the pitch: when you become a member of RANGE, you help us inch closer to the kind of stable, resilient sustainability we can only get from lots of people chipping in what they can to build a broad, stable foundation. It’s a sustainability we need to keep doing the journalism you appreciate now, but by becoming a member, you’re also investing in the young leaders who are going to keep RANGE relevant and thriving long after my old ass has been put out to pasture.
We are building this thing for the long haul, and building it big enough that everyone feels like there is room for them on the bus. My ask — to those of you who can afford to chip in — is to help us find enough gas money to get this thing all the way to the championship:
A Spokane where everyone has the tools they need to make their voice heard to ensure their needs are met, and that this community we share is meaningfully better, more transparent and more equal than it has ever been.
Luke_
