This week on the program, we’re continuing our coverage of the state of local journalism in the Inland Northwest.
Next week, we’ll bring you conversations with the publishers of two papers in rural Washington, but this week, we’re focusing on Spokane itself.
The city is home to several news outlets — last week, we heard from the executive editor of the Spokesman-Review about the paper’s future as a non-profit news outlet.
But this week we’re looking at how leaders at a few of the other organizations in town are looking at the state of local news.
Melissa Luke is the executive news director at KXLY 4 News Now, and Sam Wohlfeil is the news editor at the Inlander.
Both sat down with SPR's Owen Henderson to talk about how they approach covering large geographic areas while based in Spokane, how they've seen the news landscape change over the years in Spokane, and the challenge presented by the increasing transiency of journalists.
Each of them stressed the importance of maintaining strong local journalistic institutions.
"We work in this community. We really care about this community," Wohlfeil said. "We often understand the issues at a deeper level than someone who might be jumping in from out of town to cover a story."
But to prove the importance of local journalism and maintain community support, Luck says outlets "have to stop doing stories that are important to journalists."
"We have to continuously prove our value to the people in this community to show them we care about this, show them the institutional knowledge we have, train our local journalists to understand how to find those things, and connect people to these important things more often," Luck said.
In comparison to Spokane's legacy media outlets, from the Spokesman-Review to the three major local TV station, Range Media is an upstart.
But in just a few years, it has gained a following for its investigative stories and focus on civics reporting.
SPR’s Doug Nadvornick talked with its publisher, Luke Baumgarten about how the outlet got started, its mission and where the news organization is heading.
One question that came up about the mission of range had to do with its political leanings.
Here's part of that conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DOUG NADVORNICK: Do you consider range an advocacy media outlet?
LUKE BAUGARTEN: It's a really, really good question. I think — there's this term called movement journalism getting pretty popular. And I would say that a lot of — if you're in the know about trends in journalism, I think your first blush would be that. ‘Yeah. Range isn't a movement journalism organization. I think what we're trying to do is a little more nuanced than that; although, I think much of the reporting we do can be used by movements.
I think — because our ultimate focus is on individual people, regardless of whether they're attached to an organization already or not, I think what we're actually trying to do is empower everybody to speak out... We have this constitution. And we at a local level can use it even if folks at the federal level are trying to undermine it. And we should do that as much as possible.
And so I think, if people call this an advocacy organization, I would understand why. That’s not how I see what we're doing. And I really hope that as we do a better job of like reaching individual people, then again, it's like, would you call the Inlander an arts and culture organization?
Yeah, maybe, because their focus is culture writing. And that's certainly what I did from the time that I was there... I'm hoping we are a directory that both movements and other people can use, but I don't see us as movement journalism.
DN: Are you a partisan organization? Because I've heard elected officials — and I think you can probably guess which one I'm talking about — has [sic] called you, your organization, a partisan organization.
LB: I don't think we are. I think — and also some of our fellow colleagues in journalism have called us a partisan organization too. And I also, I do kind of understand that…
I think if we were a partisan organization, we wouldn't have hit our local Planned Parenthood as hard as we have over their, frankly, anti-worker tactics.
I think anytime you're shining a lens on power, there's an opportunity that people are going to think that you're progressive or, you know, aligned with one party or the other.
Also though, I've had a lot of people who have emailed me who are like, ‘I'm a dyed in the wool conservative. I really like this center-right reporting you're doing. Keep the government accountable.’
And so I think, I see us as doing accountability work. And I would hope that we would do that just as stridently with ostensibly Democratic politicians as we do with Republican ones.
And insofar as our council is ostensibly nonpartisan — though we know that's not really the case... I feel like our job is harm reduction for the people who have the least power. And that can come across as partisan in one way or the other. But I hope that in the long scope of history, we'll be taking people out at the knees, not for the party affiliation they have but how well they're actually serving the totality of Spokanites, which includes homeless people, which includes newly arrived immigrants and refugees.
And [it] also includes — I mean, we wrote a story about the proposal to repeal the wealth tax initiative during the last election. And the most impacted person there was the one dude who runs a hedge fund … He's a direct early stage venture capitalist. That was the guy I talked to first before I talked to anybody else.
So you don't frequently find a guy who probably has tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal as the most impacted person when we're talking about policy, but in tax situations like that, he was. And so we made — very explicitly, he was the first person I talked to
