This report was produced in a collaboration between InvestigateWest and RANGE.
When the Spokesman-Review announced plans to transfer Spokane’s 143-year-old, family-owned newspaper to a nonprofit founded by Executive Editor Rob Curley, it took over the front page.
“The People’s Paper,” read the April 16, 2025, headline, saying ownership would transfer “to you, the community.”
Key to the plan was Curley, the folksy self-proclaimed “journalism nerd” who burst into Spokane a decade ago, declaring a love for Gonzaga University basketball rivaled only by his love for Disney. The transition to Comma Community Journalism Lab was cast in media industry publications not only as a way to save Spokane’s daily newspaper, but as part of a growing movement to resurrect dying papers by making them less dependent on ads and corporate ownership and more on philanthropy and community partnerships. As proof of concept, the paper had already added several so-called “community-funded” journalists to its staff.
But in the Spokesman-Review newsroom this summer, that hopeful vision ran into persistent concerns about Curley’s leadership. More than a dozen current and former employees, along with contemporaneous records reviewed by InvestigateWest and RANGE, reveal how the newsroom had raised concerns about Curley’s management for years, culminating in his suspension from the paper on Aug. 7 and a vote of no confidence from the union, the Spokane Editorial Society. He is currently on leave as the paper conducts an internal investigation.
Employees said stories that may have angered powerful community figures or potential donors were killed or curtailed, and that they felt he retaliated against workers he viewed as disloyal. Staffers questioned his financial oversight of Comma, which hired his own son at a salary topping most reporters and recruited out-of-town executives to serve as top editors before Comma had met its fundraising goal. Current and former Spokesman-Review employees also described workplace complaints involving Curley and one of those editors, including allegations of inappropriate lewd and sexual comments around employees, including teenage interns.
Curley declined to comment for this article. In a brief phone interview, Curley’s attorney, Patrick Kirby, who specializes in employment and wrongful termination cases, said, “It’s all inaccurate,” in reference to a list of claims InvestigateWest and RANGE provided to Curley prior to publication. Kirby hung up the call when a reporter pressed him on which claims specifically he believed were inaccurate.
Tensions in the newsroom came to a head in the first week of August, as the paper rallied to cover the most destructive wildfires in Spokane’s history and the imminent ownership transfer approached at the end of the month.
Some staffers were alarmed at the prospect of working for an organization Curley founded, with even fewer checks on his authority.
“The terror had been building through advertising, circulation and this newsroom each day, getting closer to the day of knowing we would have to work for Rob without the filter of human resources and the publisher,” said one employee, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution.
Reporters had grown increasingly frustrated with Comma editors meddling with stories, and Curley tried to fire a reporter who pushed back, employees say. But instead, when other Spokesman-Review editors backed the reporter, Publisher William “Stacey” Cowles suspended Curley, citing “several personnel complaints” against him.
It wasn’t until after Curley’s suspension that reporters were told news that called the Comma plan into question. In a meeting days after Curley had been kicked out of the building, Spokesman-Review management shared that despite public claims by Curley that several reporters were paid for by community donors — a source of optimism for the Comma plan — none of the paper’s reporting positions were currently community funded.
There were “audible gasps,” according to several reporters in the room. The paper had been promoting its community-funded reporters online, removing paywalls for stories written by those journalists. One reporter remembered how at fundraising events, Curley would point to a journalist’s face on a big screen and tell donors that their money paid for journalists’ salaries. Even the reporters took pride in sharing the claim with readers.
“I’ve been lying on his behalf without even knowing it,” one reporter said.
Cowles, the publisher, said he had no comment on the claims about Curley until the conclusion of the internal investigation. He said the paper is targeting Oct. 30 to close the transaction with Comma. Bill Simer, Comma Community Journalism Lab board chair, did not comment for this article.
Saving local journalism
Before joining the Spokesman-Review in 2016, Curley had been praised in some journalism circles as a leader in transitioning struggling newspapers away from print and into the digital world. In naming Curley as the Spokesman-Review’s new top editor, Cowles said Curley had “a proven record of delivering news that matters” and that his “innovative work” at previous newspapers helped them win top journalism awards “including a Pulitzer Prize,” the announcement said.
But reporters at his previous gigs viewed him differently: as a mercurial leader who hyped expensive, ineffective initiatives, sacrificing journalism ethics to keep up cozy relationships with powerful community institutions and politicians. The Orange County Register in Southern California was criticized for favorable coverage of Disney under Curley, who served as the paper’s top editor between 2014 and 2016 and proudly said he wore a Mickey Mouse garment every day. He also faced backlash when he revised an article two months after it had been published at the request of a politician, despite police reports and other records that didn’t support the change. Curley changed the story over the objections of the reporter and did not note the changes for the public with a correction or editor’s note — a decision journalism ethicists called an “unethical overreach.”
Journalists from the Las Vegas Sun in Nevada had their own problems with him. After he left the Sun in 2012, they noticed that Curley kept getting credit for the paper’s Pulitzer Prize in 2009 — credit that Cowles repeated in the 2016 hiring announcement. Sun employees clarified to the Inlander, a Spokane alt-weekly, that Curley, in fact, had nothing to do with the series that won the Pulitzer. Curley said he’d never told anyone he won a Pulitzer, blaming a series of misunderstandings for it showing up time and time again in his biography.
Curley stuck around Spokane, undaunted by the controversies from his past. And with layoffs and buyouts shrinking the newsroom in a struggling industry, Curley two years ago began testing the Comma pitch among staff by signaling that it would save their jobs. Reporters said he told them privately that they’d receive big raises once the transfer happened. If Comma didn’t move forward, he said the Cowles family would likely lay off staff or maybe sell the locally owned paper to one of the hedge-fund-owned companies known for downsizing newsrooms, one current employee recalled.
Reporters felt Curley had compromised editorial independence at the Spokesman as well.
Staffers took issue with Curley altering an article in 2025 about a bond proposal from Spokane Public Schools. In the article, reporters wrote a passage explaining how the proposal could raise property taxes. The story had been cleared by the typical story editors, but late the night before the story was published, Curley had a copy editor change that passage “to be more in line with what the school district wanted us to be saying,” said Emry Dinman, one of the article’s two reporters. “My editors were all as outraged as I was.”
Staffers knew Comma was trying to partner with the school district as part of the ownership transition, though Dinman said he didn’t want to speculate on the intentions behind the late-night edit.
Current and former staffers also said Curley didn’t like articles that were critical of Gonzaga, a private university downtown most known for its basketball team that Curley frequently celebrated in his columns.
Rebecca Hansen-White, a former reporter at the Spokesman-Review from 2018 to 2020, said that during the COVID-19 pandemic she wrote a story about Gonzaga opening an isolation facility, which included some light criticism from a local politician for the private university using government money to do so. But the story was never published. When Hansen-White asked what happened, she recalls an editor told her something to the effect of “that may have been one Rob didn’t want to run,” though she was never able to confirm if Curley spiked it himself.
“That was very frustrating. I worked hard on this and I’m going out to the community and I’m getting in these tough conversations with sources,” she said. “And then I come back to the newsroom and find that my work has been changed or removed without an explanation.”
Comma eventually set up shop on the Gonzaga campus in 2024.
The two editors who Curley hired for Comma in fall 2025 did little to ease reporter concerns about outside interference. Donna Wares and Ron Sylvester had both worked with Curley at the Orange County Register, and when Curley brought them into the Spokesman-Review newsroom, an email sent to the staff described their roles until the transfer as “consultants” — Sylvester for “newsroom metrics and trust initiatives,” and Wares for “enterprise story assignment, editing and Northwest Passages author recruitment.” Northwest Passages is the nonprofit’s book club and event series.
That distinction was crucial for Spokesman-Review staffers, who considered it a breach of journalistic integrity to have non-staffers weigh in on editorial decisions, even if it came from people who would one day be their editors.
“We were told through the union that Comma editors would not be able to touch our stories until the transition happened,” said Emily White, a former reporter who left the Spokesman at the end of August.
But that’s not what happened.
“They were tampering with our stories with no permission,” White said.
The union filed a grievance with the company, said Thomas Clouse, union president and longtime reporter. “Our understanding was that the publisher dealt with it,” he said.
Newsroom altercation
As Comma took longer than initially expected to reach its $2 million fundraising goal, the transition kept being delayed. The presence of Comma staff in the newsroom, meanwhile, grew louder.
Comma had also hired one of Curley’s sons. Johnathan Curley made a salary of $62,400, according to a 2025 court document, topping the pay of almost every Spokesman-Review reporter. His title at Comma is “technical director,” and he handles video and audio equipment for Comma events. Previously, the 24-year-old worked as a part-time audio-visual technician for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. Johnathan Curley did not respond to requests for comment.
Staffers questioned how much Sylvester and Wares were getting paid to be Comma editors before the transition, and they were concerned that Wares spent half her time in California, flying back and forth on Comma’s dime.
Sylvester lingered in the newsroom, with staff increasingly unclear of his role. Employees described Sylvester as a disorganized and unproductive editor who often shopped online for magician supplies while in the office. He was tasked with managing the summer internship program, they said, but his involvement was so marginal that other staff had to pick up his slack.
“If you ask what his job entailed, I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer,” one staffer said. Sylvester did not respond to requests for comment.
In early August, with the planned transition to Comma just weeks away, the newsroom scrambled to cover wildfires that had caught national attention. The staff worked day and night, eventually breaking the news that one of the blazes was set by an arsonist. Courts reporter Alexandra Duggan, as it turned out, had been one of the first people to see the alleged arsonist near the flames.
On Aug. 4, Sylvester told reporters they should change how they attribute documents in stories. Instead of citing “court documents,” he said they should cite “sworn affidavits.” Despite having no clear editorial role in the Spokesman-Review newsroom, Sylvester went into Duggan’s story that night and made a change reflecting his preference — except in that instance, the record was not in fact an affidavit. It introduced an error into the paper.
Clouse, the union president, said he called a meeting with management to try to understand why Comma editors were meddling with stories again. “That never got resolved,” he said.
Two days later, Duggan, who’d worked 13 straight days, was finishing up another story about the accused arsonist. Sylvester approached her and said, in a low voice, “you’re doing it again,” several employees who witnessed or learned of the altercation told InvestigateWest and RANGE. He’d been referring to her story saying “court documents.”
Duggan walked away. But Sylvester followed, and the two shouted back and forth at each other until other editors stepped in to cool things down.
“I wanted to make sure that our stories were truthful and honest and that they were not being edited without us knowing and without any communication,” Duggan said. “And I just wanted to keep the integrity of the paper.”
Curley sided with Sylvester, telling Spokesman-Review Managing Editor Lindsey Treffry that night to fire Duggan.
Treffry refused.
The next morning, during a series of meetings with Cowles, Treffry and other editors shared complaints they had about Curley. Cowles decided to put Curley on administrative leave, revoking his keycard access to the paper’s offices.
A few hours later, however, Curley got in the newsroom again by asking an unsuspecting intern for their keycard. He walked around asking where he could find Treffry, who, according to several staffers there that day, was hiding from Curley in the photo room with other editors. Duggan joined them, and it was there that Duggan learned Treffry saved her job. As they hid, Duggan texted White, who was not in the newsroom at the time. White shared the texts with InvestigateWest and RANGE that described how Curley had tried to open the photo room door before an HR employee escorted Curley out.
“They chased Rob out of the newsroom,” Duggan texted. “I can’t see because I’m hiding.”
“I’m hysterical,” Duggan wrote, crumpled into a ball and crying.
Duggan said she’d “ride or die for this paper.” She said Curley’s attempt to fire her “felt like a slap in the face — it felt like betrayal.”
In an interview for this story, she said she’ll be grateful for the rest of her life that Treffry had her back.
“She did save my job. And she protected the rest of us from something similar,” Duggan said.
‘Jessica Rabbit’
Former reporter Rachel Alexander, who worked at the Spokesman-Review from October 2014 to July 2018, recalled a pattern of “cronyism and ethics violations.”
In a letter she sent to investigators after Curley’s suspension, Alexander described a departure of women on staff and in leadership roles during Curley’s first year; editors who left meetings with him looking “shaken, exhausted and at times afraid”; and how Curley didn’t keep promises to sponsor a former staff member’s work visa if he left the union.
“Despite the meaningful journalism I was able to do and the presence of many talented colleagues who I greatly admire, I could not in good conscience continue working for a man who was willing to lie to a friend and jeopardize his ability to remain in the country,” Alexander wrote. “I made the decision to leave the Spokesman in 2018 primarily because of Mr. Curley’s behavior.”
Before leaving, Alexander noticed that she was “nearly the only woman left on the desk,” according to her letter.
She also told investigators that Curley seemed to primarily “take issue with or pick fights” with women in the newsroom. Instead of talking through concerns, he made “petty” decisions, like blocking reporters on Twitter, she wrote.
In recent years, the paper has hosted high school interns as part of Curley’s effort to make Comma into a training ground for young journalists. But the behavior of Curley and Sylvester made some employees question whether they should be responsible for mentoring young journalists.
One letter shared with internal investigators described how, during a 2024 barbecue for Spokesman-Review interns at Curley’s house, two teenage interns saw sexually explicit images of women on Curley’s iPad as he scrolled through his camera roll. Curley had been giving the high school girls a tour of his home and showing off his guitar collection. He was looking for song lyrics on his iPad when the inappropriate pictures flashed on his screen, according to employees who had heard of the incident from the interns.
Several staff members also brought concerns to HR about inappropriate comments Sylvester made around interns who were in high school and college. In a conversation with another employee about the evolution of photography — and while sitting near an 18-year-old intern — Sylvester joked that if someone wanted to send a “dick pic” back in the day, they had to wait for it to develop, but today it can be done in an instant.
On a different occasion, Sylvester told another employee to wait a few seconds before downloading porn, according to several employees. It was loud enough for other employees to hear the unprompted comment, including nearby interns.
“It was very shocking to hear someone … who was supposed to be a mentor figure say that,” a staffer who witnessed the exchange said. “It’s just not appropriate for the workplace.”
Current and former staff members also described a work environment where people perceived as being against Curley or who reported issues to HR were retaliated against. They felt Curley had favorites — including Sylvester and Wares — who would not face consequences for their actions.
After an employee reported Sylvester to HR for his comment about dick pics, a letter to investigators said Curley appeared to retaliate against those he believed had made the report. Curley excluded one of the employees from important meetings and avoided another employee and gave them “distasteful looks.”
Curley needed to make sure staff was “loyal” to him, employees said. One employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said Curley and his allies tried to get them to divulge whether certain Spokesman-Review employees were loyal or not. Staffers said Curley also dangled future “executive” positions to two young women in exchange for their loyalty.
At least one former editorial assistant filed an HR complaint against Curley. After studying creative writing at Eastern Washington University, Brooke Lauerman, now 26, was hired in December 2024 to answer newsroom calls and emails and assist with other editorial tasks. She said Curley often treated editorial assistants “like houseplants.”
“He would pretend we weren’t there. He’d have conversations leaning over our desk,” she said.
One day about a year into the job, after most employees had left for the day, Curley told Lauerman he needed to talk to her, and brought her to an empty conference room and told her to shut the door. She thought she might be getting fired. Instead, for roughly an hour, Curley “begged” her to become his personal assistant, she recalled, saying that he needed help managing his life. He told Lauerman she was “special,” that she could be an “executive lady and make a lot of money,” and that he would be her mentor.
He said he once had an assistant “like Jessica Rabbit, I could send her into a group of guys and they’d all say yes to her, and I want that again,” according to the complaint Lauerman filed.
Lauerman felt like she was being manipulated, and she didn’t understand why Curley was flattering her so much to push her into a job that had never been discussed before.
She made a report with HR, at the direction of her supervisor. Lauerman remembers the HR employee saying they’d “add it to my list” of complaints about Curley, and Lauerman requested that the complaint be kept quiet until she left the paper months later. She followed up with a letter detailing the experience in writing.
Lauerman said Curley avoided her in the months that followed. In March 2026, as her last day of work at the Spokesman approached, he asked her out to lunch, which Lauerman declined.
The Imagineer
Shortly after Curley’s suspension was announced, the union held a vote of “no confidence” in Curley. Nearly 90% of the union’s 25 members participated, and all voted in favor of the measure, other than two who abstained.
“He was threatening the jobs of [union] members, and we would strongly object if he were to come back to this newsroom,” Clouse said.
Reporters said that since Curley’s suspension, they’ve been able to focus on journalism. The newsroom “has really felt more like home than it has for a long time,” Duggan said.
Mathew Callaghan, a Comma reporter who contributes to the Spokesman-Review, echoed similar sentiments. He called the newsroom’s editors, reporters and those on the copy desk “some of the best, most hardworking people” he knows, but expressed some concerns over Curley.
“The idea of Comma is a great idea, but I don’t trust Rob Curley to execute that idea,” he said. “I don’t think that he has the best interest of the journalists that he’s supposed to uplift. ... I don’t trust him and I question his ethics.”
The publisher has told newsroom employees he will not release results of the investigation. The union believes it’s important for the community to know what the investigation found, Clouse said.
It’s unclear what role Curley will continue to play at the Spokesman-Review or at Comma. The result of the pending investigation could decide his fate at the Spokesman-Review. But he may still remain the executive director of Comma, where employees may work for him again anyway. George Brunt, a Comma board member and in-house legal counsel, said that the board will honor the results of the investigation if it finds something indicating it is inappropriate for Curley to be in the newsroom, “with the caveat that the methodology was sound and not biased.” Brunt added that from what he’s seen so far, “I don’t think it was done in good faith.”
Last week, Curley was set to host a Comma event featuring Joe Rohde, a former Disney Imagineer. When the event started, Wares was hosting instead, but shortly into the conversation, Wares invited Curley up to the stage to conduct the interview.
“I’d like to invite the biggest Disney fan that I know, the person who is actually the chief Imagineer of Comma, to join me on stage. Please welcome Rob Curley,” she said.
The audience inside the packed theater cheered, with about a dozen people sitting near the front giving him a standing ovation, including at least one Comma employee.
Curley rushed onto the stage, with Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” booming through the Gonzaga auditorium.
