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.
The organization recently celebrated its fifth birthday, but as financial pressures mount, founder, publisher and editor Luke Baumgarten made the decision to lay himself off, at least for the moment.
Before Baumgarten made this announcement, he sat down with SPR’s Doug Nadvornick to talk about how the outlet got started, its mission, where the news organization is heading and whether the work it does qualifies as advocacy journalism, partisanship or something else entirely.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DOUG NADVORNICK: Early in his career, Luke Baumgarten wrote about music and culture for The Inlander. In 2012, he left for a more lucrative job in advertising. For a while, it was a good move, but within a few years, he felt the itch again to write and report.
But there aren't that many good journalism jobs in Spokane, so he made his own opportunity around the time of the COVID pandemic. He created an online reporting venture he called Range Media, beginning at first with a podcast. Slowly, he expanded.
LUKE BAUMGARTEN: “It was hiring our first full-time reporter, which I believe was like mid-2023, where we started really asking that question of like, where are we trying to fit? We sort of found it along the way, which was the first big reporting series that our former colleague Carl Sigristrom did, was just the real teeth of the Camp Hope crisis. Originally, it started at City Hall. They got kicked out of City Hall.
“They reformed again a year later out just east of town here, east of downtown. And there was a lot of coverage being done, but nobody we saw was just going into the camp and saying, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How did you get here? Or what do you need right now?’
The year prior, something like 20 folks had died of exposure during the heat waves, and we were worried that was going to happen again. And so that became Carl, whose background was working at High Country News, master's degree in magazine writing and journalism, used to working on a monthly schedule.
And Range at that time was only publishing once or twice a week. I mean, twice would be a big week for us back then. He's like, ‘Well, I'm just going to go check this out.’
And then he called me back 30 minutes later. He's like, ‘I think I need to be here every day until the heat breaks. And we just need to keep asking this question and getting as many eyes on it as possible.’
So from then, I think we built enough trust within the cohort of people who are thinking about housing and homelessness that we started getting document leaks from inside both city council and the Woodward administration and from within other NGOs.
We accidentally became an investigative outlet. And that was when it really started to hit us that we want to be the newsroom that starts every piece of reporting with the most impacted person.
And not just somebody who's serving an impacted population, but somebody who's actually living it to the extent possible. And that has really, I think, become our niche. And it's the thing that gets me up in the morning, I think, is just making sure that no matter how else this is covered by any of our peers in town, we're the ones that are always striving to get the person who's impacted, you know.
DN: Range has established itself in terms of its journalism, but now it's working to firm up its financial footing. You've now taken the subscription method, which a lot of organizations are. I mean, public radio has been doing it for dozens of years. But I mean, how is that working for you?
LB: It's both working better than I thought it would and not growing fast enough. So about a third of our yearly budget comes from memberships, which I think is great. And I think anybody around the nation would say it's great, but a third is only a third, you know.
And so we get the majority of the rest of that currently from grant funding, and we're working on building a small donor pipeline. So we're kind of... And the thing that makes that complicated is we're a work-around cooperative, so we're technically a for-profit. But for our missional news-related stuff, we have a fiscal sponsor.
And so people can still donate tax-deductibly. And so we're just trying to sort of navigate that world because philanthropic funding is kind of drying up. We weren't doing this work in 2016, but we've heard from basically every colleague I've talked to that there was a big... You know, anytime misinformation crops up in the last decade or so, for whatever reason, there's been a push to sort of backfill and support the journalism.
And that does not appear to be happening this year the way that it has in previous years. We already went through a little bit of this last year as well. There aren't a lot of local foundations giving to this kind of work, as I'm sure you know.
And so we've sort of been able to get funding from those more like advocacy-adjacent organizations... Foundations, I mean. And I think now that funding is getting cut across the board, people are, for understandable reasons, kind of retrenching and being like, well, no, actually, maybe we need to focus all of our money on this direct support stuff. And it's like, no ill will or anything. ‘We hope you guys do well. We feel like we need you in the ecosystem.’ I'm sure you're hearing this from some of your funders as well. But it's like, ‘We have other priorities now.’ It sucks.
But it's also, I think, the reality of any non-profit leader. Any development director is going to be like, ‘Oh yeah, that resonates with me.’ It might not be happening right this moment for us, but it definitely is.
DN: And so... So given all that, are you bullish, bearish about what your five-year outlook looks like?
LB: I'm trying to prepare for bearishness and trying to feel bullishness. I mean, I think the way you do hard stuff is you have to prepare for the worst.
And especially if you think you're doing something a little different, a little weird, things that might take some explaining or take some time for people to understand the underlying mission and stuff, you have to plan for catastrophe. And I know abundance discourse is very popular in the national media right now. So it's like, you have to plan for scarcity and hope for abundance.
And when I do feel bullish, it's about this community and not some big... We've gotten money from Meta. We've gotten money from Google. We've also been promised money from those places that didn't materialize, and at the last minute.
We've been working on funding a Spanish language desk for the better part of three years now. If you would have talked to me two and a half years ago, I would have been like,’Yeah, that person will be hired in two months.’ Google was going to pay for that.
And then, I don't know if you remember, but there was that little blip of recession talk and every Silicon Valley employer cut 10% of their workforce across the board, almost like they were looking for an excuse to do it.
And along with it went that the Google News Initiative's funding, direct funding for newsrooms. And so we got a little bit of money as an apology, basically like a graduation present. ‘This isn't going to get you all the way through college, but we hope it helps.’
And that was sort of the canary in the coal mine for what's happened in the last couple of years around funders just being like, ‘We're choosing not to prioritize this the way that we did.’
But again, everything I've ever done in my life up to and including the work we were doing sometimes at the Inlander, like the beginnings of the Volume festival and stuff like that, it's like these have all been largely grassroots funded or grassroots attended.
It's like there's been some part of the internal combustion that makes these things that we're working on grow has been tied to Spokane. And so that's where I think, if I'm going to be bullish about anything, it's bullish about this community's ability to support interesting things, if they understand it.
DN: Do you consider range an advocacy media outlet?
LB: 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.
