> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rangemedia.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The meaning we make from the work we do - URL: https://www.rangemedia.co/meaning-work-range-journalism-awards/ - Published: 2026-10-22T22:44:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-22T22:44:11.000Z - Description: RANGE has been winning a lot of awards. I’m very proud of us, and a little worried for the future. - Author: Luke Baumgarten - Tags: Range Updates, Column “I am *so* sorry,” Erin Sellers said, really stretching out the “*so*,” the way she does. “I have another question.” This may have been the 30th question she asked me that day, and maybe the fifth time she apologized. “This must be so annoying,” she said, at one point. I don’t remember that day beat-for-beat. This was years ago — near the end of 2023, if memory serves (which it frequently does not). My feelings on that day are much stronger than my actual memories of it. I do remember clearly that I was not, in fact, annoyed with any of these questions. I was feeding off them. Sellers had been hired, just a few months earlier, to co-manage our Documenters program along with another person we hired at the same time. The job required strong writing skills, but we weren’t envisioning it as a reporting gig. Soon after, our lone reporter, Carl Segerstrom, told us he was taking a job that had steadier hours and more stability than a not-yet-three-year-old newsroom could provide. He and his wife were starting a family. Valerie Osier and I had no idea how we would fill the gap he was leaving, so we asked those two brand new teammates about maybe doing more than the original job description detailed. Both looked a little terrified as they said yes to taking on such a huge responsibility. Of the two, though, Sellers looked like she wanted to run toward the terror, not away from it. She’s been running toward the terror ever since. I’ve never formally taught journalism. I’ve never formally studied it, either. I’ve always learned by doing, from friends and colleagues and a lot of self-study. That’s what Sellers had signed on for, too. I would have no clue how to write a curriculum for the journalism we do here at RANGE, but early conversations like that with Sellers give me a pretty clear idea of the first section of any syllabus I might write for young writers of any stripe, but especially reporters: > **Ask every question you have, the moment you have it.** No matter how awkward or sensitive, ask with humility and compassion until you know everything you need to know. Reporting is a process of gathering facts, of course, but it’s also a process of building trust in others and confidence in yourself. Asking questions the way Sellers did in those early days, whether she realized it or not, was doing extremely difficult work to build that dual confidence in herself. It also build confidence with her editors, namely that she could handle the extreme learning curve it would take to thrive doing some of the hardest, most consequential, most intensely scrutinized work any writer can ever do: Local journalism. **Given their origins, their diligence and relentlessness** in pursuing this work, it’s hard to act surprised that Erin Sellers’ name is all over the awards RANGE won this year for work we did in 2025 — only their second full year in journalism. Just look at our haul from the Northwest Chapter of the [Society of Professional Journalists](https://docs.google.com/document/d/16ne064vjRe3fG3nNulmVlfh9YROZeufB/edit?ref=rangemedia.co): > **Breaking News Reporting – Medium** > > **First Place:** Erin Sellers, Luke Baumgarten, Valerie Osier, Aaron Hedge, ["Everything we know about the Spokane ICE protests](https://rangemedia.co/everything-we-know-about-the-spokane-ice-protests/?ref=rangemedia.co)*”* > > *Judge's comments: Thorough coverage during heightened emotions.* > **Poverty & Homelessness Reporting – Medium** > > **First Place:** Erin Sellers, ["Jordin v. Brayman: Spokane's first right-to-counsel eviction trial by jury"](https://rangemedia.co/arlin-jordin-eviction-trial/?ref=rangemedia.co) > > *Judge's comments: The article reads like high level fiction, but it is built on a foundation of facts and due diligence. Outstanding work and a fascinating situation.* > **Second Place:** Erin Sellers, "['It's Hard to Really Call it a Study](https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=00657e5c8cad7d1f2381327ca73c4deadebd20c5f3d742de0b4a4f3dca09b7f5JmltdHM9MTc4MDQ0NDgwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=1192f84d-547a-67a2-37c4-ee805576668e&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmFuZ2VtZWRpYS5jby9zYmEtc3R1ZHktZmluZGluZ3MtYW5hbHlzaXMv&ref=rangemedia.co)'" > > *Judge's comments: This article illustrates the need to avoid accepting "studies" at face value. It would have been easy to simply blast it as partisan, but the reporter makes the case through fact based sourcing. Simply excellent work that reminds me to question authority.* > **Technology & Science Reporting – Medium** > > **First Place:** Erin Sellers, "[The State of Surveillance in Spokane](https://www.rangemedia.co/flock-cameras-spokane-county/)"\* > > *Judge's comments: Exceptional explanatory story on a now ubiquitous surveillance technology: how it works, who uses it and why it's concerning. Bravo!* > > *(\*this reporting also got second place for Series)* Each one of these pieces stands on their own, but they also demonstrate the many different ways reporters find stories. I remember standing at the top of the stairs, just outside our office door two summers ago, when Ben Stuckart texted me to say two young men he had been helping navigate the immigration system were picked up by ICE. I remember asking, “should we go?” and I remember Sellers responding, “I think we have to.” Then she packed up, and trudged off, where she put her body on the line and was eventually (in my view) assaulted by the heavily armed and completely unaccountable agents of the federal government. Breaking news is brutal because, to be truly excellent, you have to always be ready to answer any call and be ready to put your body into a volatile space, having no real clue what’s going to happen. You have to stay cool enough to report thoroughly and produce a coherent, fair and hopefully thought-provoking account. The other stories on this list are variations on what journalists call [enterprise reporting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise%5Fjournalism?ref=rangemedia.co). Read the definition at the link if you want, but my personal idea of enterprise is a little more visceral. To be a good enterprise reporter, you have to be a little obsessed. You have to have seen something or heard something that is so distressing or compelling that you feel drawn to develop knowledge of a story so detailed you effectively see things other people don’t. Then you have to be discerning enough to narrow the aperture back down to find the actual story. Lots of people ask me how we get the stories we get, as though the answer is going to be clear and straightforward, but it is in fact vague and recursive and half a joke: it’s a reporter’s job to throw themselves in the deep end until they feel like they might drown. It’s an editor’s job to make sure they don’t. I believe RANGE excels at both sides of this dynamic, and the results speak for themselves. In fact, I believe that, on the rare occasions we do truly find ourselves in a breaking news footrace with our colleagues at the *Spokesman*, the tv stations or public radio, it’s almost always a result of months, if not years, of enterprise reporting on a particular topic, not because we have a breaking news reporter listening for the police scanner to chirp. I believe it was our obsession with understanding the local impacts of national immigration policy that led Stuckart to text us before other outlets. I believe it’s that same obsession that led Sellers to answer the call, and soon after, that led the rest of our team to drop everything and build the comprehensive report that won us that award for breaking news. What more could one say about such an incredible year? Well … **I’ve been in a cold war with the team about even writing this column**, and a shooting war with myself about why I can’t just shut up and write something purely celebratory. They want a straightforward celebration! And they deserve it! I’m having a hard time delivering the assignment they have very reasonably asked me for. Why do I do this — to myself, for God’s sake, as much as anything I’m doing to my colleagues? One answer to this is “I don’t know how to have fun” — and, to that: fair enough. I feel my old-man-yells-at-cloud quotient rising by the day. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/e7/35e7a6d5-1d7d-405c-9ee3-dce92dfd190f/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-ac44d4af-ef5f-4e7a-8eba-de0127f0696f.png) **Live look at me writing this* The other is: “I worry.” Sellers deserves every award she won this year, and more. But so did Aaron Hedge, who wrote a clutch of great pieces in 2025, including this [deep look at how Charlie Kirk’s plan](https://www.rangemedia.co/charlie-kirks-pacific-northwest-ground-game/) for[ ](https://www.rangemedia.co/charlie-kirks-pacific-northwest-ground-game/)the Northwest was largely led from Spokane, which RANGE was able to publish just days after the man’s assassination. People who haven’t been reporters have no sense of the reality of this work. Hedge wrote the story quickly, but he had been reporting it for a half-decade — studying the movement partially because he grew up adjacent to it — long before he ever came to RANGE and before, I think, he ever thought of himself as a journalist. I could write an equally laudatory top to this column about Hedge’s rapid development as a writer. It would include [a 2023 cameo from Daniel Walters](https://www.rangemedia.co/charlie-kirks-pacific-northwest-ground-game/#:~:text=%28central%20insights%20of%20which%20familiarity%20I%20owe%20to%20investigative%20reporter%20Daniel%20Walters%2C%20who%20in%202023%20talked%20to%20me%20for%20more%20than%20an%20hour%20explaining%20the%20Groyper%20wars%20and%20Kirk%E2%80%99s%20opportune%20shift%20from%20traditional%20fiscal%20conservatism%20toward%20Christian%20nationalism.%29), who shared a decade or more of knowledge with Hedge long before they ever worked together, for no gain other than helping a community member understand a movement — one of the many ways journalists educate our community without publishing a word. (Mentoring other journalists being, for me, one of the greatest acts a writer can perform and for which, I don’t believe, there are any awards.) To write that top, though, Hedge would have had to be the one getting all the recognition, and this wasn’t his year. That’s the Janus face of awards. No matter how many you win as a reporter, the majority of your work — and likely some of your absolute best pieces — will receive nothing. In this reward structure, a journalist might reasonably conclude that they aren’t any good, because they didn’t win any awards. Without a strong culture of service inside their newsroom, they might find themself chasing those awards, thinking that awards are the same as impact. Those are not just bad outcomes. That’s a perverse incentive structure. We made RANGE a worker-owned cooperative to short-circuit these issues by building a community-centered, nurturing incentive structure. That’s why we are so focused on growing our membership. I think it’s the purest, cleanest way to turn reader trust into money for writers. Writers write something that resonates, people become members, the newsroom gets profitable and, because the writers own the company, the writers benefit. We couldn’t imagine a worse idea than trying to build an elaborate, disconnected revenue structure on top of an organization we wanted to single-mindedly focus on justice for working people. There are so many opportunities for good intentions to poison the well. Instead, we theorized and are building our profit model in order to *reinforce* the natural instincts journalists have, not work against them. RANGE makes money the more it leans into earning and reinforcing reader trust, by turning trust into the thing journalists have found hard to find for the last 20 years: a decent enough wage to thrive in the same community you work. Thus, at RANGE, the trust we generate with community-centered journalism becomes money our team can directly use to continue building their lives here, in this community. And you know what? We are small, but the model fuckin’ works. RANGE ended 2025 in the black, and we will be in the black again when we get to the end of this year. Because we write for community, not for notoriety. **Now let’s zoom back out:** what incentives have we built into a journalism industry where fewer and fewer newsroom owners live in the communities they serve, where journalism jobs are precarious, and where most people are not going to be able to stay for their entire career? A journalism industry with fewer journalists means also fewer editors, and fewer grizzled veterans to help mentor the cub reporters along. What signal of the “right way” to do journalism is left for the generations coming up in these disinvested husks of newsrooms, except awards? If a high enough percentage of your worth as a journalist is being meted out one individual award at a time, isn’t that going to lead to more individualistic — maybe even selfish — decisions by journalists? Maybe it leads to decisions based on hype rather than truth. On short-term trend-chasing and not long-term trust-building. That starts feeling like influencer culture, not newsroom culture. (Obligatory thank you for following us on [TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@rangemedia4all?ref=rangemedia.co), but you are following a team of journalists, not fucking influencers.) So yeah: I worry. That worry isn’t theoretical, either. I’ve seen it happen in the most excruciating detail. I lived through it. **Five weeks, three drafts and roughly 6,000 meandering, digressive, borderline-dissociated words** trying and failing to write this column, I think the problem is me. I learned all the wrong lessons in my first bite at journalism. As a much younger writer (I got my first journalism job at about the same age Sellers got hers), I didn’t have the level of support and safety I needed to build the stable sense of self I think is absolutely necessary to be a well-adjusted person, let alone a good teammate or a great writer. That struggle of comrades I mentioned above? I’m in the wrong. I am also the cautionary tale of this story. In the absence of mentorship, I looked for validation in awards and accolades. I would spend entire workdays during award season finding my best clips from the year and begging my bosses to submit them all. I won a lot of awards for my culture writing in those years, and even one or two for long-form reporting. Over time, the regional awards stacked like cordwood in the corner of my cubicle. I won my paper one of our first national journalism awards, for arts criticism. The first time I got a chance to write a cover feature about a best-selling author, that author’s publisher asked to include the essay in the first paperback edition. That essay is sometimes taught alongside the book itself in comparative literature classes. You can find a few of my stories collected in anthologies with titles that start “Best American” and end in “Writing.” I absolutely did develop a sense of obsession with writing like the kind I’ve mentioned above, but it was a selfish and twisted kind of obsession, forever focused on justifying my own existence, not in any way turned out toward the world. I stopped feeling pride in the writing I had done unless someone complimented me on it. Later, at a different job, a coworker brought me a sheet of gold stars. “You seem to need these,” she said, jokingly. It was the most devastating sight gag I’ve ever endured, because it was true. The work *was* legitimately good, though. I sometimes look back in awe of myself in my 20s and how confident my writing feels on the page (a confidence I find has largely left me in my 40s). That confidence as a writer was a mask I wore to obscure an insecurity as a person so deep it crippled my ability to connect with people, though. I don’t want to even ask my former colleagues if I was a good teammate. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t. I wasn’t even 30 when I began to realize I had pieces of myself that desperately needed mending. The broken parts were buried so deep, though, I had no clue how to reach them. That old saw about everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer was deeply true for me, and for years I kept pounding the same bent nails into the same length of board, trying to build a sanctuary for myself that felt safe, even as I suspected I was using the wrong materials. By the time I got priced out of my first journalism job, my friends and I had already started [Terrain](https://www.terrainspokane.com/?ref=rangemedia.co). I think I gave up on journalism more easily than I would have otherwise because I had found the healing I needed outside of the newsroom. I found healing in community. When it came time to try and return to journalism, I knew only one thing for certain: I had to find a way to bring community along too. I think we’ve achieved that here at RANGE, and it’s the thing I’m most proud of. There is not, as far as I know, an award to be won for it. **What would it look like to give awards differently?** Funny you should ask. There’s an example, and RANGE won it, too. In April, the Washington Coalition for Open Government emailed us to say they wanted to give our [Flock coverage](https://www.rangemedia.co/flock/) their Key Award. They don’t give these awards out at a yearly convention. They don’t even give them out yearly. They only give them out when they see work in the public interest that meets their standards of excellence, and which uses public records and other transparency tools they advocate for as a non-profit. They are a statewide organization, but they didn’t ask us to come to Redmond to receive the award. They offered to come to us, asked us how we would like to receive the award, and who we wanted to invite. So yeah, we kinda had to plan our own party, but that ended up being the most beautiful part. We provided the guest list and our community did the rest. A RANGE supporter from the coop movement booked the space, sent out the invites and handled the logistics. A RANGE supporter from the music scene DJed. Our bakery colleagues at Great Harvest provided part of the spread, and SWC’s operations manager drove it down the hill. We gathered on a rooftop on West Main, a space that was provided, free of charge, by the Community Building. On August 27, we all gathered. I wasn’t sure anyone would come, but they did. They arrived until the rooftop felt basically full. We weren’t even serving free alcohol. They’d shown up to celebrate us. DJ Spicy Ketchup tee’d up the original RANGE podcast intro music (which made the OG RANGEheads cheer), and our team shyly shuffled up to the front to accept our award. I didn’t prepare anything (I had stupidly not considered that I might be asked to talk), and I fumbled with what to say once the microphone passed. It allowed me a moment to look out on this big group of people who came just to toast the work we had done. One of the tables was full of reporters and editors from the *Spokesman* and the *Inlander*. I felt an almost unbearable mix of emotions in that moment. There was joy and security, but there was also guilt and sadness that only our team was getting to experience it. All the awards and accolades never came close to approaching what I was feeling. I started welling up, so I just rambled something about how community journalism takes the entire community, including our peers in other journalism outlets, to work. I had no way of putting my range of emotions into words. I still don’t, so I’ll end like this: I’ve been blessed to experience something like the full love of this community many times in my life — it feels like a towering wave of light that lifts you up and pulls you out with it, whether you’re ready to cry in public or not. Those floods of love have always come from my work as an organizer, though. It had taken over two decades, but on that night this August, I finally felt it as a journalist. My hope for communities like ours is that we can build a culture of appreciation for journalists like the kind we’ve already built for other types of community leaders. I certainly hope the rest of my colleagues in journalism, regardless of where they publish, won’t have to wait for middle age to know how loved and appreciated they are — for the work they do, sure, but far more importantly: for the people they are.