to KYRS Medical Lake Spokane. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. to KYRS Medical Lake Spokane. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media.

I'm

your host, here with Aaron Sellers, my co host, and the whole rest of the team. We have one last pre recorded show for you before returning to our normal live in studio setup. But today we're in our office and we got the whole crew together to talk about News Year Resolutions. Right?

Cringe. So

So clever.

also joining Aaron and I are Aaron Hedge, Our newly full time

reporter, Um.

stoked to be here.

Yay.

Chief Liberty State Correspondent, And, audience and business manager, Val Osher as well. first of all, guys, I've been very out of the loop for a couple of weeks for reasons we'll talk about, but I will not go on and on about, cause I really just want to get this season of life past me.

Did you, was

But, uh, what did you guys do with your break? Did you have fun? was it restful, stressful? How are we feeling?

I'm still on break, so you can ask me that in two

two days. Yeah, we should say we are, we did not pre record this like before our break. we have a conflict this afternoon. We're recording this about four hours before this is going to go live.

is

but has it been restful so far? Are you looking forward to your birthday weekend,

Yes, yeah, I'm going out to a cabin in the woods to do nothing and be away from my phone. And actually going to spend some time with our good buddy, Nate Sanford.

Oh.

Fun.

of the Inlander, now at the Seattle, no not Seattle Times, KUOW.

KNKX

At Cascade PBS. He's more of a fellow, just like our Sophia.

Yes.

be talking about Sophia a little bit later on. Val, what about you? You said you did not do any work for like two

weeks. Yeah, it was really awesome. I didn't open my laptop at all. Um, You

did still take a couple calls from

me I did take some calls from you, and then said, go away. Um, and it was pretty relaxing. I

uh,

uh,

worked on my house a bit, and hung out with friends, and I did a little solstice ritual with some friends, and that was fun. Really? Yeah, we just like lit candles and stuff. Yeah. It was very cool.

about

What about you, Aaron Hedge?

books, which I had not done since I graduated from my MFA in June of last year. June two years ago.

Not

Not any

full books. I like, paid attention to these books. It was nice.

That's

It was really relaxing.

What was your favorite book?

The Island of Dr. Moreau. Yeah.

Who wrote that

one again? Is she well? Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. because I never read the book, but I saw the pretty bad nineties movie

The, the book is a a little more gruesome than than the movie really, because it's surgery instead of gene editing.

Fascinating. Oh, I got really, really sick before the break, um, and I won't.

won't

Uh, I won't bother people with the details, but it was brutal. These guys got some of the details, so I don't, And then I like, I don't

know,

my middle aged body was falling apart a little bit, so I don't feel like I got a vacation per se. I did get good time with family though, and I got to catch up with some friends and I got to see a few good movies. And I think all of these things are going to tie into my personal resolutions for, What we do at range for the next year. the small amount of time I got with friends and family and stuff solidified what I've been wanting to do going into 2025 with at least my part of range, So, um, yeah, I'm glad all everyone's feeling pretty happy. We're going to pretend Aaron's not here right now. Sellers because you are technically still on break. But,

yes, please don't email me if you hear this podcast. no phone calls yet.

You

You got to get the, you got to get to inbox zero after vacation, not before. It's like you're setting yourself up for disappointment

808, so.

Oof, that's brutal.

right, so, news year resolutions. Do you want to go first Sellers?

Sure, Alright. Alright,

Alright, so we're going to just do this, what are our personal journalistic and then some team goals for the year. So this is an informal pitch, What are our personal journalistic goals and our team goals for the year? And, you know, aspirations for Spokane. Sellers, go first.

Well, my big like personal personal goal for this year is to buy a condo, which is just like a personal resolution. But I also feel like it relates to my work because it feels like a decision to. permanently be a part of the Spokane community and invest in it and, you know, do the range mission of like, live here, work here, be in community here, write from here. Um, as a writer though, breaks make me ambitious. Um, I was not taking calls from Luke, I was calling Luke to be like, hey.

started it? Geez.

Not on purpose. I was at home with very minimal internet and I was just like stewing over all of the things that I wanted to do when I came back. Small Potatoes is following this Planned Parenthood story out to its logical end. We've got some, some more coverage planned and the story made a pretty big splash locally, but I feel like we haven't. been able to get it to the part of the conversation about the national context around Planned Parenthood union busting which isn't just happening here. it's happening in lots of places.

the reporting we were doing, you and I, Sellers, before I got sick, and then you carried it admirably across the finish line, uh, was, this is not the first time the affiliates associated with the Broad Planned Parenthood have union busted. It's happened a couple other times. it got local coverage in all of those cases, but it hasn't really gotten national coverage. And it seems like there's, this is now the fourth, third or fourth affiliate, at least third, but I think fourth.

it's hard to tell 'cause a lot of news outlets don't dive in really deep on what's going on with the behind the scenes of unionization. So you'll see an article that's like, oh, after long fight Planned Parenthood unionize. But you read the article and there's no real context as to what, what made it a long fight, like what was going on behind the scenes. And, I feel like we're uniquely positioned to do that kind of labor reporting, which is one of my bigger new year news, news year resolutions is to do more labor reporting. And I love my city government coverage for all of you who read it and read my live skeets or tweets. That's not like going away, but I want to spend a little bit more dedicated time. running down labor stories, whether that's Like, one a month

yeah,

doing follow

ups to stuff and just kind of making sure we carve out that because, look, there have been times when we've broken a big story and everybody else has jumped to follow us and write more coverage on that. like you've had like a story almost straight up stolen by TV outlets. I noticed that with this one, nobody else cared. Like it was a big story for us, a huge story with our analytics, and there was no TV news stations. The spokesman didn't run any follow ups, nobody else locally cared about labor. And so I feel like we need to like really carve out that, that niche. I,

I, I

this so hard. It's think part of want to do with feeling like a journalist again, which we'll get to. in, a second is, is connecting with labor even know if I've told any of you this story, but before there was anybody else at range except me when the Davenport sold. For like 32 million dollars or something and there was a two week long Ticker tape parade in the media for the worthy family who you know renovated the original Davenport and then built the other stuff around it

It was

like, you know, hooray for business people and then a couple weeks later Kxly had just like a really short story about how they had settled

on

a

theft dispute for that was just one of their catering teams for a specific two year period of time, and they settled for 3 million. So one tenth of the value they sold that company for was Accounted for in this, this wage theft settlement.

And

That went over like a lead balloon. Like nobody even commented on it other than that one little story. And we weren't in a place to do deep reporting yet at range. And it's really, really bothered me that we have lots of business reporting. We still have a business journal in this town. So people are covering business all the time. Nobody covers labor. Yeah. So I think that's definitely something we need to do.

need

Yeah. Um.

So

more labor stories, I went home for Christmas and my dad told me he's a range subscriber, which is very cute cause they don't live here. And most of what I write is like hyper local only matters to people in Spokane. But he told me that his favorite story of mine from the last year was one that I wrote with Lauren Pangborn, the top 10 dangerous intersections. And he said that it wasn't boring. Like it grabbed his attention, even though ostensibly a story about, uh, 10 intersections in the city you don't live in. is probably pretty boring, but he really liked it and liked the ways that we integrated embeds and the format was, we weren't restricted, and I think being able to, do that. to really lean into the fact that we are digital media. We don't publish physically figuring out. I, one of my first stories back is going to be using like a map that, our friend Kai built for us and just really trying to lean into not just like using these tools, but sometimes building stories around these tools and the ways that we can utilize digital media in a way that other people can't to make boring things. Interesting. Um, I want to throw another politic role. That was fun. I want to throw, Luke and I have been talking back and forth about a May Day party, and I want to moderate city council election debates because, I don't know, like I cover city government just as religiously as the spokesman reporter does and maybe more so than the Inlander, although it's not an incredibly fair comparison because Eliza is pretty new, And we have three city council members up for election, and I don't want range to get shut out of those debates, that legitimacy. And also I think there's space for us to do kind of fun stuff. Like, we've got our two candidates, we're all eating progressively spicier food and the questions are getting more aggressive.

Holla on

so we

get like a cool local chef to like make little bites that

are like

spicier. And you know, we go from like, Oh, So and so, tell me about your family and why you ran for office and then by the last plate it's like, Okay, so two years ago you said XYZ and you know, Jonathan Bingo, you've always made a point to say you're here for your district, but you took a month off this summer and also spent a ton of time campaigning. Like, how were you balancing the needs of the people in your district while you were also running for another office? like, how do you make that case that you were?

get spicy with it.

Yeah.

I

like that.

questions.

Spicier and spicier questions. And track a bill through Washington leg sesh. Some of my, I was looking back at my work from last year and two of my favorite stories were on bills that were moving through the legislative session. There was one on the Keep Our Care Act and one on, the act proposed by strippers or workers. One passed, one failed. And just tracking the local Spokane impact because there's not a lot of Reporters looking at stuff in Olympia and how it. affects Eastern Washington. And even the spokesman's Olympia reporter lives in Olympia. They don't live in Eastern Washington. There's, there's like no designated Eastern Washington, ledge sesh reporters. At least that I can think of, correct me if I'm wrong. But,

Yeah.

figuring out how these big statewide things actually impact the people on this side of the state is really important to me.

And

And we've got, kind of for the first time in a long time, we've got our, at least the district three representatives, two of them are new. Well, one, Richelli is moving from the House to the Senate, so he's in a new position there. and and Natasha Hill is going to be a new legislator in the House. And also it's going to be a bad budget year in terms of like there's not much is going to get through because of the projected deficit. And so I think there's more opportunity for east side voices to get drowned out,

over other

other priorities in years like this. Yeah,

Yeah, so those are, that's my list.

That's great. Alright, up next, Val.

next,

Ooh, um, okay, so my personal but slightly related to range, uh, goals are to trust my intuition more and um, I'm coming in strong. Um,

woo woo,

it is very woo woo. But, um, also setting boundaries for work life balance. Um, I really love my job, but I need more brain space. Um, like in general. So,

I think,

um, I think, you know, taking, you know,

know,

being off when I'm off, you know, um, is a good habit to have. Um, um, maybe get to inbox zero every day. Um, or at least really close to it. I'm really bad at email and I hate email. And, if you've emailed us and haven't gotten a response, I'm really sorry. it

is very precise ADHD goals. So continue.

Um, and then, I want to read more classic books and, nonfiction. I just put that H. G. Wells book that Hedge just read on my TBR. I read a hundred, 141 books this year. they're, they were all audio books. So don't be like, impressed that I always have a nose in a book because I'm usually like knitting while I'm

listening

or coloring. Um, but I did meet my goal of having 10 percent of those be nonfiction. Um, so this year I want to make 10 percent of the fiction books I read be classics and 20 percent of my total books read to be nonfiction. Um, are you,

do you have a spreadsheet to make sure you can hit these percentages?

Yeah, I have an app. Uh, I use Storygraph as an app. Um, and it gives you like percentage breakdowns and like graphs and all that stuff. It's great. Um, I also want to watch more movies and TV shows so that Luke's, Luke stops yelling at me for not getting his references.

That'd be

Um.

help me too, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Um, a couple

A couple weeks

ago on the radio we were talking about how you. Independently invented time as a flat circle, um, and didn't understand Luke and i's HBO reference.

Yeah. The, yeah. Our True Detective or Friedrich Nietzsche. .Yeah.

Nietzsche.

yeah, one of those 20% of your nonfiction books could be, um, being in time or one of, no, that's Heger. um, but

Bowling alone.

but, well, bowling alone is on the list too, but, uh. Like, thus break Zarathustra or something.

Luke has been, uh, yeah, it's on my list.

I was going to be really upset if you put Hedges book on your list, but not

mine.

Definitely put your book on my list. Um, and Luke has been nagging at me to watch this Netflix documentary, uh, called, What is it?

Join or Die.

Join or Die. Um, and I, it's based off a book and I was like, can I just read the book? And he, and then I saw it at the library and it's a 19 hour audio book, But I think out of spite, I'm gonna listen to the audio book instead of watch the movie.

Which just makes me want to, we should put some sort of like child devices on these windows because every time

says something

uh, also

something like that. I just want to jump out this

window.

Um.

so

all right. Work, work, work goals though. I think it actually would, this thing though with your personal life values, it ties into what I've been thinking about a lot when I wasn't, you know, comatose over break with my illness. Um, it does really resonate, not just the work life balance, but We spend so much time thinking about the immediacy of the news that's happening in our area. I got a chance, I don't wanna spoil my own, um, reflection, but I got a chance to like, engage in some non journalistic media and it left me feeling hungry for more of that, but also making me feel like it gave me some ideas for stuff to do as well. So I think that disengagement like that isn't just a personal self thing. It, it also.

and I

Tends to make you ready to, do your job, too. You

Yeah. And I want more like, disengagement, not dissociation. There's like, a big tendency in our culture to like, zone out, like, watching TV or even listening to a book. Like I do it too.

um,

where you're just watching that media or consuming that media, um, as a way to dissociate from your like regular life or your regular stressors. So like kind of savoring that art better, I think is a, is a good goal.

I like it.

Um, so work, work goals. Um, I really want us to do more explainers. Um, uh, we have had this thing called Encyclopedia Spokanica. It's something that we've been wanting to do. Um,

I like this.

I got an email from a reader, uh, before break, um, who became a member, and they were asking some specific questions about, like, how to, um, like, talk to their representatives and stuff. And I was like, oh wait, we have, we have some explainers. We did this. We did this work. And I was able to pull, like, four or five articles from this year explaining how to connect to your representatives at the state level, the county level, and the city level. And I was really proud to just like have that in, in the

stock. Yeah, totally.

So that's one thing I really want us to do. And then, um, more community events. Um, Aaron has proven that they're really, really, really good at. having cool events and making them happen. Um, and so maybe like we can figure out ticketed events so we can do even cooler stuff, um, that supports it. And, and I think that would be very cool.

Um,

this is kind of boring, but, uh, very important for our existence. Um, I'm now the, uh, business operations manager for range, um, title, actual title TBD. But, um, But I really want to flesh out our strategic plan and have us like stick to it, but also leave room for,

you know, But

leave room for like new and emerging ideas that we have because so many things, like the news just happens, you know, um, and then we get ideas from that. And, um, I want us to be flexible and nimble enough to jump on those opportunities to serve our community. in real time, but also not get distracted from the overall goal of like, making sure range can afford to exist.

Yeah,

Um, being able to get like our paycheck,

Yeah

um, so that we can live. Um, so making us stay on course. Um, I'd really like us to get our documenters program relaunched, um, with community partners to make sure it's sustainable. Um, we have some, community partners, um,

Able

Like we're working out ways, um, that they can help us operationally.

hmm

Um, And now we just need to, to raise funding for, um, actually paying documenters. So that is in progress, um, but I really would like to get that, uh, relaunched this year so that we can continue to do that

like

serving our community and teaching people how to access this information and helping people have a little side hustle. and also, we're

really lucky to have Hedge full time, but there's only two of us, so that leaves a lot of meetings nobody is going to.

Yes.

sure. Yeah.

Um, and then I also have a really fun idea, um, for creating community spaces that, um, could really revolutionize our community and kind of use the best model of Documenters. Um, so I want to figure out like grants or ways to make that, happen. um, and maybe tie it into our Documenters program somehow. Um, that might not be this year.

year. Laughter.

That Bowling Alone book and Join or Die movie that we were just mentioning a couple minutes ago is directly connected to Val's desire for community spaces. And this is where the, uh,

The

Kali

to colleague terrorism that happens when I'm suggesting a movie that's only 90 minutes long. It would be a quick watch. You could probably watch it while you're making dinner. Uh, and

If I want to watch an, or listen to

listen to it. Yeah, you'd rather watch, you'd rather listen to a 19 hour audio book than just the 90 minute thing that I suggested you listen to. But whatever. Do whatever you want. I don't care.

I

thinking about your, your, um, idea for this yesterday. Cause I posted on like Blue sky. What do you want, like folks, what do you want to see out of journalism? And somebody was like, I want to see more on gatherings of all sorts. Where and when are people meeting and for what? how are people building and supporting their communities? And then they went on to be like gatherings, like all sorts of things, club meetings, yard sales, debates, exhibitions, crafts fairs, guerrilla gardening, street cleanups. Like everyone would benefit from more gatherings and knowledge about gatherings that have been planned. And I think a lot of people going into 2025 are thinking, hopefully more intentionally about community and being in space with people. And how we like show up and help our neighbors and meet our neighbors and engage with our community both civically and socially. So I think it's like the right time for something like that. so,

uh, That is a big desire, uh, putting it out there into the universe. Um, not in a woo woo way, but in a like

Just lean

into it. Okay, I'll lean into

into the woo woo. Now, so this is

woo.

putting it out to

being broadcast.

so You

so you are putting it out into the universe in the form of radio waves.

waves. Yes, I see. Um, and then I also want us to get to I want to get us up to a point with revenue that we can give our reporters well deserved raises. Um That's like my goal for this, like a really big goal for me. And it's, um, really high priority because I want to make like, we all have living wages. Um, but I want to make sure that we all have thriving wages and that we can really, you know, all be part of our community without worrying about bills or anything like That Um, and like, I know that, um, like having a living or a thriving wage, like enables me to volunteer, you know, on Saturdays and not think about like getting a second job or whatever. And, um, I, I just really want that for everybody.

Um,

so that means like advertising revenue, membership and donations and merch and all that stuff. and then I also want to get us grants for growth. So

to

able to like hire dedicated community outreach people and, dedicated advertising people, um, person, one person each probably. Um, and being able to sustain ourselves for the longterm. That's great.

That's great.

my goals.

Really looking forward to that. Um,

Thankful to

And thankful to you, Val, for taking over the part of my job that I really realized was slowly killing me. And so, let's also be mindful of the, of whether or not it starts slowly killing you as well. But, um, no, it's part of what I'm hopeful for is, um, Literally only possible because you're taking on more of that role. So I really appreciate that. Um, it's going to make my year a lot more fun. I think.

Um, all right,

all right, hedge.

I like the nerdy stuff.

Yeah. we got a little bit less than 25 minutes left. Uh, so hedge hit it. You are full time as of yesterday.

Woo. So we

should say that

I was halftime for most of 2023.

You weren't actually working halftime though. You were

Uh, I don't know what you mean.

not.

not up.

We told him to only work out on a

was 20 hours

week. We told him to only work that long. it was a

was a flat 20 hours a

week. Mm-hmm

Nothing more. Yeah. But now you're full

full time.

really excited about that, um, and I'll tell you why in terms of my job here in a second. But I guess to start with my personal goals, um, My first one is I, I like to rollerblade and I wanna do that more than I did last year. Um,

I love it so much, man. I want to know, you got to start like videoing yourself rollerblading or at least like, let me know when you're going to be rollerblading past an area. Cause I want to just like see you in the world with a big smile on your face. And for anyone who

who hasn't seen Hedges rollerblades, they're very like, Ken. Like Barbie Ken rollerblades.

to roll with it. Um, and

And they're so amazing. And I love them so much. So

That's how God intended rollerblades.

to become closer

Um, And I want to, like, slightly more serious, I want to become closer and more intentional in my relationships with my friends. Um, my first two years in Spokane was spent in a dark corner of a room working on an MFA. Hey.

And

And I don't really think I developed, I have, I have good friends from that program, but I

they're

I want to make more friends in the community and be a better friend.

Um.

And a little bit of a segue into the, from the personal into the professional is I want to be like more creative, intentional and intentional in my, like, I just want to become a better writer, um, in terms of like the craft of putting words together. Uh, I've been reading a lot over the break of creative essays and in journals like N plus one and the, and the baffler and that writing is just incredible and was inspiring. And I want to try to move toward that if I can. In personal writing and in professional writing, uh, that gets published. Um, the rest of my goals for the year are kind of like individual stories. Um, and the first story that, that I'm, the first story that I'm going to be working on this year involves, and this should publish fairly soon, um, involves police accountability and deadly force review boards at the Spokane police department and there's There's a lot of, there's a lot of undercurrent to that. There's a lot of, uh, legislation that's been proposed by advocacy organizations. And I think one of the, one of the main things that I want to track is there's a bill that would establish an office of independent prosecutions. there is currently, an office of independent investigations at the state and they're ramping up their efforts. They're pretty new and small and they're only doing, a few investigations here and there to kind of test the waters. But their process is when they finish an investigation, they send the results of it to the local prosecutor. Um, and there have been a number of police killings here in Spokane. We're consistently in the top 10, uh, police departments in the country for

for

police violence

per capita.

capita. Yeah. There's a woman I've been talking to. Her name's Debbie Novak. She's a, she's an advocate for police accountability and her son, David, was killed by Spokane police in 2019. Um, and the officer was never prosecuted. In fact, he was promoted recently, to detective. And, currently if the Office of Independent Investigations sends, um,

their results

back to a local prosecutor who's already, already declined to prosecute a case.

it's unlikely that they would like change their mind.

yeah, which, which was, yeah. And that was the case with David is, uh, The county prosecutor, Larry Haskell, declined to prosecute him. But if there's an office of independent prosecutions, their recommendations will go to that state office rather than a, than a. Then a. local prosecutor who probably has ties to the local, whatever agency it was. Um, so that's, that's a really interesting like slate of stories

Once we get, once you get a little, let's, we should have, we'll have you back on the, on the show to talk a little bit more about that. I've got about a million questions and we don't have a ton of time for that, but that feels like a big one. Um, for all the reasons you underlined in the few more. So I'm really glad we're hopping on that story. Um, really? What's next for you? Yeah. Um.

one thing I'm going to be keeping my eye on is something that I've already done. A lot of reporting on is How governments from the local to the federal are going to be getting clean water to West Plains residents

who have been,

many of whom have been drinking, uh, forever chemicals basically out of the aquifer for, you know, a number of years. Um, and this contamination came from the two airports out in Airway Heights, Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport. and the Department of Ecology is, basically like forcing SIA, uh, the International Airport to, uh, To go through a state remediation process where it cleans up its contamination and part of that might entail like getting clean water to folks But we're not really sure How that's gonna look there's also the county wants to form a task force that can look into that and That would add to existing efforts the EPA and the Department of Ecology and Fairchild are all providing water to some people But it doesn't look It doesn't catch everybody and there's still a lot of people who are suffering. Um, and that's a, that's a huge story. Uh, and I'll be, I'll be looking closely at that as it evolves.

Yeah.

and then I guess more generally, I guess if I'm, if I'm being really ambitious, I think I'd love to start looking more closely at rural communities, just generally, um, things that are, stories that are happening and, um, Towns out kind of in the hinterlands. Um, I've been talking to a person out in, who lives in Chihuahua, who, uh, who's aware of a bunch of stories out there that nobody really knows about. Cause the, the local publications don't really have the resources to, to, report on that stuff. And I think that, I think that, you know, if, if we have the capacity at range, like that's, that's a space that we could try to occupy. So that's one thing that I'm really interested in.

interested in. Stephens County specifically, I keep hearing rumors and, you know, rumors of rumors about some pretty wild stuff happening in the individual towns, but at the county and then Private people doing wild stuff too. And so, yeah, it's, and you're right. It's, you know, there, there are a couple. That's one of our colleagues just on

Not on TikTok! Not on TikTok! The stripper's bill of rights that I followed last Ledge Sess just went into effect

today. Oh wow. The post,

like, That I was trying to repost on Ranger's social media to be like, we covered this. I was doing work stuff, but I didn't know that it had like a loud music attached to it.

It's

very cool. Strippers bill of Rights goes into effect. We covered that extensively. And, we've, we should say that we already have a partnership, not in Stevens County, but in Ponderay County with the Newport Minor and as part of the WSU Murrow Fellowship. Um, we've a colleague whose name people have seen in the paper but probably we haven't even done the, Hey, I'm Sophia. Her name is Sophia Mattis Aldis, and she's been working up in Newport. For a few months now, had a couple of bylines with us, but this year we're going to um, deepening that partnership and making she gets more bylines in range as well. And, and I think to your point, Hedge, part of what we're thinking about through all of this yeah, being that maybe deeper investigative conduit for smaller publications that you know, still have a weekly presence in their communities, but probably don't have the capacity. because the weekly grind is a grind to go deeper. And so, that's a partnership we're going to be exploring more deeply with the Newport miner and they cover West Bonner County, Idaho as well. So getting into that like west of Sandpoint where we've done some reporting. Hedge, you've done some reporting as well. and then also seeing what we can do

in, Stevens

It's really great. I think we take as Spokanites, those of us who live in the city, we take for granted the idea that we are the cultural center of this. And so people that live in Chihuahua are forced to get Spokane news. And I sometimes think people in Colville, Chihuahua, Newport, Chattaroa, where I grew up, like, they know as much about Spokane as any individual Spokanite does. but the reason we're a cultural hub is because all these You know, areas feed us, literally feed us. Like people come down to shop in our stores and stuff cause they don't exist. And it's part of this big agrarian area and lawn resource area that has fed our local economy since. Spokane began, and I feel like we, no media right now, us very much included, does a good enough job of covering what's going on in those areas. Like, Spokane should know as much about its rural areas as rural folks are kind of forced to know about Spokane, I think. it'll, that might, may never happen, you know, like, getting totally, like, super dialed in on every little area of our rural communities, but it's certainly an aspiration of ours, so I'm really glad you're tackling that. One last thing you said here before we jumped to me though, and I don't even know anything about this, you just threw it in our document, union busting and fire districts. What's going on with that?

Or are we scooping

you?

Well, so I, we've, we've got some, we've got, we've got some tips recently about some union busting activities that have happened in some fire districts up in the, in the rural areas of Eastern Washington. And like, Obviously, um, Aaron Sellers has done some excellent reporting on, on union busting here. That stuff's happening everywhere, um, including in rural communities and, and I'd like to dive into that too.

It's awesome. Yeah, I think we, take for granted. I mean, one of the things that I'm kind of preoccupied by is like, what does it mean to be working

where do.

And where to where do working class? people do their work? You know, and that was such a big narrative. For the last few national elections, you know, whether or not working class people were, we're not voting for Trump or Biden or Harris. And I don't even feel like we really have a good working definition of what working class is anymore. And so maybe I'll just like start sliding into what I was going to talk about. One of those is that getting a little more thinki in different parts of what we do with about 10 minutes left to go on the broadcast here about

it's 15. I started about 55.

Oh, okay. So we got about 15 minutes, great. Um, so it's just like, okay, we were talking about this news that's happening to us. Like this is what's happening. Um, what ought to be happening? What do people think we need? Where do people think we need to go next? in order to make Spokane the place that people want, want to live and spend their lives. and the people who are committed to living here and maybe, can't leave even if they want to because they're, a certain socioeconomic bracket, like making sure they have the tools they need to fight for, more. I think going back to the personal for a second, I want to live more in the world. I want to connect more deeply with community. This is what we preach at range. And I think of all four of us, I've been kind of the worst at it. I think partially, As we already talked about, I had a role here that forced me to do a bunch of little business tasks and stuff that had experience in, but don't love doing. And, and I think in general, just as a human, I never, and not because I felt unsafe or because I'm walking around with a mask all the time. I just don't feel like I ever came out of my cocoon after COVID. We're like two or three years past the worst of it. And I feel like I just got in a rut. And so even though I was super sick for most of the break, I did get some time to just go out and have, like you were saying Val, just everybody here actually has said some version of like spending time with friends, spending time with loved ones, seeing movies, not because there's something in it for range, but just because I wanted to see what all the fuss is about with baby girl and, uh, the Bob Dylan movie. A complete unknown.

going to

That's next. I'm definitely doing, we're, we've had to, our friend group has had to negotiate Nosferatu. 'cause there are some very anti horror folks in my movie friend group. The most vehemently anti horror movie friend is gonna be out of town this week. So we're

probably going to see it this

we don't, whatever. So. Because, you know, I started my career not as a news reporter, but as a culture writer and columnist. And I'd kind of forgotten or turned off that part of my brain where I'm like, I'm watching fiction. I'm watching a movie and it's making me reflect on the world, which is what good art is supposed to do. And I want to reconnect with that part of my life you know, it sometimes feels like. Everything in the world is reducible to what we see on social media, but there is art still being made in the world for God's sake and we should be engaging with it. so yeah, that's my big plan for myself this year and I think it's going to pay dividends for the work I do at range is just to get out of my head more, get off social media, more experience, what the world has to offer in a more concrete way, have more time to just have conversations with people, sources or not in real life. we did hang out as a team, everybody except Val, cause she was sick. We would just like went and got tea and ended up talking about work a little bit over the break, but also just, talked about random things, life. And that's I think where the real juice happens sometimes, and I'm excited to do more of that. Um, specifically then also the way I get news is way, way, way too informed by social media. I'm feeling like it's just such a toxic, all the platforms are toxic to some degree. and no matter whether they're toxic or not, they're an intermediary between real human connection, which is the connection we find when we're in physical space together with each other. I just bumped into this person at a holiday party. There's somebody in town who's like, I feel like I know you because we're friends on Facebook. And they could tell me everything about myself. And I was like, I'm getting to know this person for the first time. But of course, what I put on Facebook is not actually me. That's not who I am. And it made me think that, I'm excited for people to get to, you know, I'm excited to get to know people outside of their social media presence because we really don't learn very much from what we choose, what each individual person chooses to put on social media. Like we've decided to just like not advertise on social media anymore because it hasn't kind of been working for us, but we have these limited resources that I think we want to devote to more community organizing type audience development. And I just don't want to keep giving money to people that I think are intentionally or inadvertently destroying the social fabric. Uh, So yeah, more in converse, in person conversations with people Um and kind of being less I don't know if it's unfair of myself to call this transactional but like I'm so busy, I only really get to justify hanging out with people when I feel like there's a productive end to it. And I just want to have more of that in my life, of just being like, I'm hanging out with sellers because we both want to go see this weirdo horror movie that we hear good things about. Or, you know, my friends or my

things about Or, you know, my friends

I had you, I had already gone by the time you invited

I had a hard time by the time you invited me. Well look, for

I might have,

me accountable. I'm listening

Well

look, thank you for holding me accountable. I'm listening and

mean

I, so, yeah, I mean this, I, yeah. I, that is a very good point. And I even thought about, like, I had a little movie nerd meetup group on, like, literally on meetup. com that I did a few years ago. I was like, do we want to do that? Very millennial.

Get everybody on letterboxd.

Yeah, but it's like, no, actually what I want to do is, that, that would be a version of trying to make it productive. And it's like, doesn't mean that I don't want to talk about movies with people and maybe even talk about them on the podcast or something or on the radio show, but I really want to make it about people. This is not productive time. This is like human connection and, uh, insight time, I guess, or whatever. all right. What final thing we got about 10 minutes left here and we can wrap up. Um,

Does the show that we send have to be 55 minutes, right? Total?

Basically, yeah.

in here we've

There's a little bit of, there's wearable room, so I got to get editing, but, um, um, I want to figure out how to get more ideas in range, which is, my vision for this is explicitly not opinion, And certainly not just like, Lauren Pangborn, our urbanism and transit columnist, I'm not talking about like a person who loves transit and wants to write transit columns, I'm talking about the kind of opinion columnist where you're like, writing about Syria one week and about PFOS on the West Plains the next week. You know, like that's not the kind of opinion I've ever wanted to do. And I really don't want it to, I want it to be more focused around subject matter experts, maybe even academics who are, who can use their specific expertise to help curate a conversation around, okay, here is, is what's happening in Spokane. Here's where we're at, how ought we. respond to it. What are the ways we, in which we should respond?

Kind of like that Matt Anderson piece we put out.

yeah, the Matt Anderson piece in, in like a non 4, 000 word version of that. But yeah, yeah. and, that Matt Anderson piece actually got a lot of traction.

You know, I'd really like to see this include, like, lived experience folks as well. Because I do think, like, there's a ton of value to the academic perspective of, like, Okay, here's what's worked places, here's what hasn't worked places. Here's maybe why Houston worked and why Spokane's not. Or, that's

San Diego imploded.

But also, like, I'd love to hear the first person narrative of the guy who got arrested for pedestrian interference while eating a burrito for breakfast on the sidewalk. you know? Like, What was that guy's experience with the system and how did we end up here?

Well, and I, I've been, I'm, I am definitely thinking a lot about academics. Cause there's probably like 300 professors or 400. There's like, there's just so many people. We have like seven colleges in

and

and all of these folks would be like, Oh, I'm a political science professor looking at presidential elections in the 1800s. It's like, you've spent your, like, why not? Why not spend a little time doing like, you know, Applied research or applied, you know, sort of talking about Spokane, you know, it's with some fraction of your time But then the other piece to your point Erin is the conversation we had About the rental tool a couple weeks ago on the or a few weeks ago now on the on the radio show with Johnny

I

Can I add that to my new year's resolution is to get that off the ground.

ground?

Oh, no, that's definitely, that's on mine too. Yeah. So that's one of them is getting that, um, getting that tool built and actually seeing how well just building these little tools for folks how well it works and how much people like it. Cause that's definitely, that's definitely on our, that's on my list too. Um, but yeah, Johnny is a renter and had some really great insight, um, and really great questions that we then were able to ask that, sort of made this theoretical tool idea that we have better and we couldn't, it wouldn't have been as good without her. Um, so yeah, I think lived experience is a huge piece of that as well. Um, I don't know how to do this yet exactly, but I really would like range to be a space where culture writing happens as well. Probably not like the event driven stuff you see in the Inlander and the Spokesman, but we wouldn't exclude stuff that was tied to events, but we learn about ourselves as people and we talk about art and culture and I think there's a real, space for more contemplative culture writing. that we could do a pretty good job with.

I'm excited about that. Um, my ran Fair piece, which I think like 10 total people read, was also one

my favorite

stories that I've written.

written. it was a great piece.

a great piece.

I don't know, I think there's interesting spaces to write about where politics intersect with, like culture for sure. You know, what's the punk scene here? What's like the subculture movements that are happening in Spokane? I just met this gal who was like a burlesque dancer in Walla Walla. Um, and a friend of mine brought up this really interesting conversation about like, yeah, this town is full of talent that has nowhere to, perform or, when they are performing, it's for like wine tourists, and not for,

like, community. In Walla Walla,

Yeah. and so thinking about like, who are the cool people in Spokane doing cool, weird things like you with Terrain 17 years ago or whatever. And

Yeah.

there's just so much of that, that, you know, I love the Inlander, but usually they catch things right after they get cool. And not before they get cool.

Well, and because they're a weekly focused on, I mean, and this is like, these are conversations we had for the longest time. When I was at the Inlander, it's like we have such limited space, which isn't a problem for And when I was at the Inlander, it was like we are this sort of, here's what to do with your week. Here's how you shape your week. And so that really led to us, um, biasing toward event driven stuff, which for a weekly paper is, you know, an arts and culture paper is a really smart thing to do. I don't want to compete with that.

That's

can

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. Um, And I think in short, my goal, and I actually hope all three of you hold me accountable to this. Uh, I just want to feel like a journalist again. I got a little emotional on the phone with one of you. I can't remember who was Val or Aaron. Yeah, about like I started this thing partially to figure out if I could be a journalist again. and survive. and part of my self realization the last few months is that I've, I'm mostly not doing journalism while I'm trying to, you know, while we're all trying to build this thing, that's, you know, a sustainable, fun, beautiful place to spend your entire career theoretically as a journalist, if you want to stay in Spokane. And I'm not getting enough of that myself. And especially now that Val's going to be. taking a significant amount of the business duties. I have nobody to blame but myself if I don't

don't feel like

end of this year. so I want everybody to hold me accountable to that. all right. Any final thoughts? We got a couple minutes. Then I'm going to have to edit a little bit out so we can go a little bit long just to make sure we got some buffer. But

think there's a lot of people who are really excited about range that we can do a better job of like tapping into, Like folks who reach out about freelancing, folks who reach out about like, Oh, I've got this idea or like I could help with podcasts or I want to talk about this or I have data skills And it's really hard for me to ask for help. Like this story with Kai, I feel so bad about like asking him to do something for free. And we do have some, some money now for freelancers, but also I think being okay with like those partnerships that aren't transactional And like, I don't know. And I am really excited to work more with Lauren and have like a regular columnist.

Um,

that story that I was talking about was like a partnership, which is weird to write, like a partnership between a journalist and a columnist. But I think we did a good job of striking that balance between like voicey and actually like fact driven informative. Um, and I had a great time working with her. So, Oh, and games! Range games, with Sarah and Johnny. Um, which is another thing we're working on. is like, Getting people more embedded in range and getting range more embedded in the community in like a fun, quirky,

cool kind of way. I don't

know. And I mean, Sarah, I have to give her her flowers. Sarah's had City. She was like the person that, um,

helped me come up with

City Hall bingo. Uh, and I think her and Johnny sit and do the Inlander crossword like every week. Yeah. Um,

That's so cute. It's very cute.

They sit down at this local coffee shop and they do their crossword together. I love them. And they were like, what if we could write our own games and have it be like embedded in range, but also in community. So like maybe a clue for like a crossword would be like a local business and then that local business gives folks like a 10 percent discount if they show their completed crossword. And, and that way you're like, you're reading the news you're engaging with range But also you're supporting a local business. They're getting connected

just

it just creates more of a network

page 42 Bookstore like leads a like local business mingo thing that we could probably tap into.

Yeah.

Or see if they want to partner with us on something.

Yeah, definitely Um, I need to figure out how to do embeds on the website though. Cause I think that would be cool to be able to like complete it on the website. They want to do some like, you know, like New York Times strands, different versions of like, not just crosswords, yeah, I think that that would be really cool. and just like working with more people and getting more voices in range, um, more regular editing support

Yeah,

that's

that's why it's other goal is to get us

There's more support in general.

editors.

Yeah, Uh, Val and Hedge, any final thoughts?

I like the idea of, this isn't an original thought, but just like, piggybacking off of Sellers. Like, I think it's not only useful, but also kind of incumbent on who don't want to ask for help to lean on their community a little bit. Because if we don't do that, like it just contributes to this, like,

we're

getting, we're getting less help. that we could get, which makes our work not as robust as it could be.

Yeah.

And it also, I think, contributes to this, like, kind of notion of the news industry as like a hermetically sealed

Mm hmm.

or

For sure.

that's like not accessible to the public. so it like, I'm really into that sellers. That's cool.

All right. We should probably close out. That was a good, good thing to end on. That is our time for this week. Um, Aaron, you want to play us out?

Do you have questions about local government? Wondering who to complain to about an issue in your neighborhood? Which agency governs certain things or why something is happening? How much it costs? at freerange at kyrs. org with your questions, and we'll try and answer them next week.

Free Range is a weekly news and public affairs program presented by Range Media and produced by Range Media and KYRS Community Radio, KYRS, Medical Lake, Spokane. See you next week, everyone. Bye.