As part of SPR News' series on local journalism in the Inland Northwest, we spoke with leaders at a few of the other media organizations in Spokane to find out how they're are looking at the state of local news.
Melissa Luck 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.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: Melissa, I'll start with you. You've been in KXLY's newsroom, and therefore the local news scene, for over 20 years now. How would you say Spokane's local broadcast journalism has changed in your time here?
MELISSA LUCK: Yeah, I think, I mean, broadcast has changed mostly in the way that we deliver the news. So before it was, you know, we had news at five o'clock, and when you wanted to know something, you turned on your TV at five o'clock. And we know now that the demand for news throughout the day is so much more important. And, you know, not just for people out in the community, but journalists too, we want to be constantly informed of what's going on.
So I think our biggest change in broadcast has been how much more quickly we're putting out information, because we know that people are getting it in a bunch of different ways. I always use the example of — I'm really part of our target audience as far as news viewers, and most of the time at six o'clock, I am not at home in front of the TV. I'm driving kids around, I'm running errands, I'm at sports games usually, and I still want to be informed, and I want to be connected. So I think the biggest change in broadcast is the demand for that.
There has been contraction as far as staff goes. There are fewer people in our newsroom than there were when I started 20 plus years ago. But a lot of that is because some of that job consolidation makes sense. It used to be, we had a staff of 10 photographers. Now we have three photographers because our reporters are shooting their own video.
That's good and bad. It depends on how you look at it. But a lot of the time, the equipment's lighter, and it's easier to do your own editing and that type of thing. So there has been change.
We have more digital journalists, obviously, than we had 20 years ago. So some of the change has happened in the jobs that people are doing based on the demand.
But also, we do have a lot more people who, they are here for two years, and they move on, and they don't have that deep connection to the local community. And that's really where good local journalism happens.
Really, after two years, people start calling you for stories, and you start really being [in] enough of the community that you're just seeing those stories everywhere. So we've lost that.
People tend to move on faster than they used to, whether that's because of pay or they want to be closer to their family. You know, it's all of those reasons all the time. So I think that institutional knowledge is really, really important, and I think we've lost a lot of that.
OH: And Sam, you've been at The Inlander for eight years now. What have you seen evolving on the print side of things?
SAM WOHLFEIL: Thankfully, in our newsroom, we haven't had major shrinkage. That has happened in the print industry at large. I always tell people, my very first day as a full-time print journalist, they laid off two people in the newsroom that I was in, and that continued every six months that I was there.
And I was very vocal at the time. I was like, ‘Why did you hire me if you're firing people?’ And there was an older person in the newsroom who was like, ‘Kid, it's because you're cheap.’
That's not a great answer to hear as you're jumping into an industry like journalism, but it's kind of the truth. And it's sadly why we're seeing that loss of institutional knowledge in a lot of places.
And it is also, I think, why you're seeing a lot of people jump around from career to career, because it is not a high-paying job. It's definitely one that most people are in it for the passion, because we care. We care very deeply and want to tell those stories in a very fair and factual way.
But it's not always something that you — you can't really buy a house anymore as a young journalist or start families. I mean, these are things that people are considering.
OH: So the reason we're having this conversation is the recent report from Washington State University that had pretty dire things to say about the state of local journalism in Washington, especially access to news in rural areas. And each of your newsrooms covers a fairly large part of the Inland Northwest, but has your home base in Spokane. What are some of the challenges that come with covering an area that includes a place like Bonners Ferry in Idaho, but also Colville in Washington, while you're based here in Spokane?
ML: I mean, our viewing area is a massive audience. It goes all the way, basically, over to Wenatchee, up, people get us in Calgary, down, you know, south of Lewiston, and then all the way over into Montana.
It doesn't make logical sense that what we do here is going to make sense to a lot of those communities. And also, it's different in a lot of these communities now, because they have, whether it's a digital outlet or something has sprung up to kind of fill that void.
I mean, half of our audience is Kootenai County, and it is a big, huge part of our audience. So, there was a time when I started, we had a bureau in Coeur d'Alene, we had an office there, we had somebody that was stationed there all the time. That's not the case anymore. It is a challenge.
And we do want to cover those stories. We had a reporter in Bonners Ferry this week. We haven't been to Bonners Ferry in — I don't know when the last time was.
So I think a lot of the ways we make up for that are — Zoom made a big difference. I mean, there was a time where it was like, gosh, if we want to go to Kellogg to do a story, you lose an hour of drive time there, you lose an hour of drive time back. You've got to shoot video, you've got to edit a story, get it on at five o'clock.
We'd like to be in those communities to tell those stories. It's more important. But if we're like, gosh, we have to tell this story, let's do a Zoom interview with somebody.
Let's still find ways to cover that. The expansion of digital, I think, has helped a ton in that way. It's easier for us now to get on the phone and make a call about a story in the way that a print journalist sometimes would to tell that story in that way, too.
So it's hard, but it is important for us to still do that. It is a balance for us all the time, but I think the technology has made it so much easier. I mean, I guess my personal bias, I grew up in Pullman and grew up in eastern Washington, and I think a lot of people who live and grew up in this area kind of feel attached to a lot of the other communities throughout this area.
I personally didn't feel super attached to Spokane when I was growing up, but it still felt like news from Spokane was relevant, oftentimes. But I don't always necessarily feel like we're jumping in as like these parachuters from out of town. And I always try to get my writers, and personally, I always try to ask people how they describe their place, how they describe what's going on, how they describe why this is important to their town.
For us, yeah, we don't thankfully have as many of those pressures as you all have for radio going and getting the actual audio in person or for the visual with the video, but we do on occasion try to make those trips out. It is easier for us to get those phone interviews done.
Often, our considerations are, ‘Okay, this is going to take one of my three news writers away for an entire day to go do this. How much can they get on the phone ahead of time? Can they do several interviews or at least schedule several people to talk with while they're out there so that it's a super productive day? And can we get the photographer to go with them that day so we can get photos of all these different people who might be featured in the story?’
We try to cover North Idaho quite a bit. We do have a really large distribution. I think it's like a thousand locations that we put the Inlander out at where people can pick it up for free, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we're covering each of those communities in depth.
OH: A quote from the report that really stuck out to me was, ‘local journalism is also essential for fostering a sense of community identity and cohesion.’
How do you build that sense of community cohesion when you're covering this massive area, especially when so many of these places don't have local outlets?
ML: I don't know if I'll answer this correctly, but I do know that humanity is humanity, right? So one, we're always trying to find the people that are impacted by the story. I think good journalism makes the world smaller just because you find that humanity connection.
There are a wide-ranging set of views in this region. We get emails all the time from viewers who say, ‘Oh, you did this story, but’ — we're doing a lot of stories about immigration right now and the raids that are happening and the impact on people. And people are saying, ‘Don't you know where you live? This is a Republican county and blah, blah, blah’.
And I'm like, ‘That's not my job.’ Our job is not to do stories that reflect the exact majority political view. In fact, I would argue it's the opposite.
So I think if we can find people that are impacted by stories and find that connection so that when we do a story in Bonners Ferry and someone in Spokane sees it, and they can say, ‘Oh, I get where you're coming from here. And now I have a different relationship to these views of the story that I had before.’ That's when we're at our best.
Do we do that every day? I wish we did, but that's really hard to do. So I think when we can find the people that are impacted by the issues rather than the people setting the agenda, that's when I think that community is formed or is built in that way, I guess. I'm not sure if that answers your question, but that's what I think about when I think about when local journalism is at its best.
Sam talked about the parachute journalists. And people come in and they try to say, ‘Eastern Washington is this. Spokane County is this.’
And I always say, ‘You are totally wrong if you think that we are this monolith of people.’ And maybe that was the case 50 years ago. Maybe it was the case 20 years ago. It is not the case anymore.
So how can we continue to find those underrepresented voices who may not even trust us to be on television? And it's really hard to get people to go on camera and share their views. But the more we do that, I think we make the community smaller.
OH: One of the concerns raised in the report is actually for the journalism workforce itself. Researchers say more newsrooms are having to rely more heavily on freelancers or volunteers, and that's threatening the pipeline of journalists that are entering the pool for the future. I'm curious what trends each of you have seen when it comes to the workforce of journalists entering your own newsrooms.
ML: It really ebbs and flows. Four or five years ago, during COVID and the year or two directly after COVID, we had a really hard time finding journalists. I think part of it was — people were not nice to journalists.
It didn't exactly look fun to get yelled at all the time and called fake news, right? There was kind of a little bit of a lull there. People may have gone to school for journalism, but they were like, ‘I don't want to keep doing this.’
We're losing a lot of people to the tech industry, to marketing, to that type of thing. And I don't know how to do most of those jobs, I'll say that. But in a lot of ways, it's easier. You get paid better. You get better hours. You can work remotely. I mean, there's all these wonderfully attractive things about those jobs.
Not that being in journalism was sexy when I was in college, but it's less sexy now, I think, that because you can make so much more money and do these other things and, again, not have people yell at you and not have to work on Christmas Day, then people maybe aren't necessarily coming into this.
I think it's coming back a little bit, and I'm actually surprised by it. But the last few times we've had positions to fill, we've had a lot better qualified candidates or people who really were passionate about this.
I don't know what that is. I don't know where that's coming from. But I think it's, in a lot of ways, getting better.
But I think the preparation in colleges has changed, too, in a lot of ways. I don't think it's been great of really preparing journalists for — maybe they're teaching them how to run a camera or run an audio board or whatever, but are you really teaching them how to be critical thinkers and how to be great writers? And that has changed a lot, I think, over the years, too.
Spokane, this used to be people's second job in TV. When I got here as my second job, and most people had been here for a while, we're hiring a lot of people out of college now because the bigger markets are hiring people right out of college.
So that shrinks our pool, and it makes it so that when our journalists come in, there's a lot more training in that first year than there used to be. So those are the biggest trends I see.
But I think we have to really dig into this idea of the public service of journalism and really dig into that, because if you think it's just going to be fun, I have a rough lesson for you to learn when you get started.
SW: So I've only been the news editor for a year, so I'm relatively new to this role and kind of leading the team. I do have a younger news writing staff of my three writers, so it has been a lot of training that I've had to kind of jump in and remind myself how to teach people how to do things, how my professors in college taught me how to do certain things.
I don't know that that's going to continue on as people move on and we fill roles again, or if we'll get people who are more qualified. I do think in general, it's similar on the print side of things. You'll notice The Spokesman has a very young staff; most of them have only been there for a couple of years who are on the grind of the writing side.
I do think they have several people in their newsroom who are more on the editing and team leader side who have been there for quite a while. But yeah, I think we're seeing younger writers. And people are kind of burning out, and they are attracted by those jobs, unfortunately, because until our industry can maybe pay better, I understand why people are kind of jumping out.
OH: You mentioned burnout, and I want to drill down on that a little bit, especially in the post-COVID world of journalism. How do you keep journalists with you, especially when, like you talked about, it can be a very demanding job? Sam, we'll start with you.
SW: Yeah, I mean, I think you just do kind of have to be passionate about it, first and foremost. If this isn't something that gets you up in the morning and makes you want to go to work, it probably isn't going to work out in the long run.
So recognizing that passion in people, and thankfully at the Inlander, we cover arts, we cover culture, we cover music, we cover fun things. So trying to sprinkle in some of that fun stuff in between writing about hard news, I think, hopefully helps. And I think for us in our newsroom, we do try to keep a pretty good eye on the work-life balance.
So thankfully, being a weekly paper that only publishes once a week, and we don't do as much online-only content, I'm pretty able, typically, to say, ‘OK, I know you're working on two or three things right now, and I know you went out on Saturday, and you're trying to go out this Sunday. Let's make sure that you take a day off this week in the middle of the week as much as you can instead of spreading that out over two hours off here and two hours off here.’ Because I want people to have that balance.
I've personally been too passionate sometimes and started to burn myself out because I was taking on a lot of stories, and I was excited. I was 23, and I could do everything. So trying to make sure as a manager that people aren't signing up for too much, I think, is an important element of it, but also not squashing that passion.
Because I think if people are passionate about a certain topic, helping guide them on those stories and the things that they can cover in a deep way that they can build an expertise in that topic, that's a really important thing.
ML: I think that's the biggest thing is if you don't love this, don't do it, because it does not always love you back. The term ‘burnout’ is, in the big scheme of things, relatively new to journalism.
It was just like this badge of honor. I worked all these hours, and I was the same way, super passionate. I was a reporter, and I'd be at home drinking wine, reading federal court documents. I still do that sometimes, but no one's paying me to do it.
I think that's the main thing is you just have to recognize if you love it. What I've had to do as a manager is exactly what Sam's saying, is recognize it in others. By the time you recognize it in yourself, it's too late.
And I tell journalists all the time because so many of us do work off the clock because it's just our job is all around us every day. And I would say to them, ‘There's going to be a day that I'm going to need you to come in extra because there's going to be a major wildfire or something huge is going to happen. So I need you to preserve this because there is a time that you are going to need to work extra.’
And then the thing I always tell people is ‘The only way to have work-life balance is to have a life outside that's bigger than your work.’ I needed to have kids, and many years into having kids before I even recognized it in myself.
But we'll say to them, ‘I want your hobbies and your life outside of work, or travel, or playing video games, whatever it is, pour yourself into that because then you'll just be so much better when you come back to us.’
I think we're lucky that we work for companies and for people who value that. And not every company and every manager does.
So I can be that way because my boss is that way because my company is like that. So I always recommend to journalists when they're starting out or they're moving on, make sure the people you're going to work for have those values because if they don't, then you're going to burn yourself out too. So I think there's a lot to it.
I do think at the very end of the day, if you're not passionate about this and get excited about policy — or I like to tell people things they didn't already know, that's a passion for me. If you don't like that, this is just not going to be for you.
SW: As much as this report that we're here to talk about did kind of say like doom and gloom for Washington, what I saw was that Washington has this odd, in a great way, number of still family owned outlets.
And that is one of the awesome benefits of this area. If you can get to a place before it goes away that is family-owned, still, it's amazing not having the pressures of a capital investment fund or a giant chain that just wants to continue cutting things and regionalizing jobs. So you see a lot of that consolidation happening.
And that isn't typical when you have just one off or maybe a family-owned paper that owns several local regional papers. So as much as you can find those, like you said, like places that care about you and the local place, the better.
OH: So if local news is in danger, and each of you clearly believes in its importance, what can be done? I know that's the million dollar question. But how are each of your newsrooms adapting to meet the needs of your readers and your viewers?
ML: We're going to solve the whole problem. It is the million dollar question. We're going to solve the whole problem now.
Now, there's a couple things about it. I mean, I'm a second generation local journalist. I'm also married to a local journalist.
This is incredibly important to me. But it's also because I live here and I'm raising my family here. And it's really important that we sustain this and not just sustain it, but make it better.
I think there's a couple things. Leaning into local is the number one thing we can do. That seems so obvious. We are a local television station.
But it's so easy to get distracted by the big shiny thing in Washington or Washington, D.C., whatever it is. And we do still have to inform people about what's happening nationally.
Maybe they only have a half hour to catch up on the news today. We want to give them all of that. But we have to continuously prove our value to the people in this community to show them like 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.
One thing we tried to do in the election this year was not just tell people what was going on, but empower them to find the resources to do it themselves. So that maybe they won't watch our newscast tonight, but they might remember, ‘Oh, they connected me with this judicial guide of how to figure out who to vote for for a judge’ or something like that.
The more that people are empowered and care about their community, I think the more they're going to connect with local news. We just have to consistently prove our value.
And I think the only way to do it is, if it were up to me, it's more local journalists on the street, right? I don't set the budget for my company, but I do know that our company does believe the same way I do. We just have to be more relevant in people's lives.
You have to tell me how this impacts the people that live here. And if not, they're going to tune us out, and they already are. So leaning into local, I think the more we can do that and be relevant is really the only way to get it done.
SW: Yeah, I agree. I think, like you were saying, making the stories important to the people who are reading them, that's a big question that I ask anytime there's a news pitch meeting. Like Melissa was saying, just really trying to connect with local readers and across a large region and try to make those stories important to everybody who lives in eastern Washington and North Idaho, as many as you can.
Everybody loves puppies. Everybody loves kittens. Not everybody loves county commission meetings.
But as much as you can try to dig in and say, if I'm not a government nerd, why do I care about this? Is this going to raise my taxes? Am I going to have to pay more money? Have they shown that they've been good stewards of that money over time?
Those kind of things, I think, are really important. And it's not something that community members have time to do. I think reminding the community that the value of having local journalists, a lot of it is, do you work full time? Do you have time to go to city council meetings or to county commission meetings or to sit through six hours of a legislative session to get to the nuts and bolts of what this bill would do? That's a lot.
It sounds very government focused, but the same rule applies to a lot of issues in the community where there's a ton of value in paying people to go out and have that time to dig in where nobody else in the community has that time. They've got families, they've got kids, they got soccer practice.
They can't sit down for six hours and dig through 600 pages of printed material that they got in a public records request. It's really important to have people in your community doing that.
OH: Melissa Luck is the executive news director for KXLY. Thanks for being here.
ML: Thank you.
OH: And Sam Wohlfeil is the news editor for the Inlander. Thanks so much for joining us.
SW: Thank you.
