Journalists use “TK” in their story drafts to indicate a piece of info is “to come.” (Art by Valerie Osier)
I laid myself off this week.
RANGE is staring down some serious financial hurdles, and I’ve been working long hours for months, losing a lot of sleep, trying to find new funding sources.
I haven’t found any yet, and we can’t wait any longer. We probably took too long to make the decision as it is. The newsroom I love so dearly can’t cover its costs, and business math is simple: if you can’t cover your costs, you have to cut them.
That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on RANGE. I’m hopefully doing the opposite. I hope we’re buying ourselves the time we need to survive.
While I’m gone, RANGE is going to keep empowering our community with information. We’re going to keep holding the powerful accountable. We’re going to keep centering the people most affected in our work. I’ll get into this in greater detail later, but the team has already been doing this work for months.
I’m also not disillusioned. The money thing sucks, but we’ve been beating the odds since the beginning. It’s surreal to say in a post where I’m basically firing myself, but it’s the truth: I’m more confident in what we’re doing now than I’ve ever been. We’re closer to sustainability now than we ever have been.
I believe in our team more than I ever have. I know in my bones that our vision of changing Spokane through radical access to democracy — empowering our communities to fight for their specific and shared needs — is more important today than it was in 2020.
I see the impact we’re making in the region. I see the growth of my colleagues as professionals, friends and just people. I see these things and it makes me emotional. I’m crying a little bit right now as I write this, if you must know.
This doesn’t mean the end of RANGE, and I hope it isn’t the end of my time here. I hope it’s just a brief little furlough and not a permanent pink slip. The money we need to raise to continue is totally doable, and I’m really frustrated with myself that I haven’t been able to make it happen.
All I can do is lead the horse to water, though. I can’t make the horse donate $45,000. I haven’t even found the horse, yet, and so here we are.
Either one of us goes now, or all of RANGE goes in a month or two.
Why me? While the team agonized about making a cut, I was never in doubt about who should go if it came to that.
Because of the issues facing us, I’ve had to scale back my editorial role since late January, and the rest of the team has had to step up.
This was a little scary for me, because I’m a perfectionist and a control freak, but that’s all my baggage. I wasn’t worried about them, and for the last few months, they’ve demonstrated why: They do amazing work, day in, day out, and they’re growing in ways they might not have if I still had my fist on the reins 24/7.
Why would I mess with that?
That’s my practical reason, but there’s a philosophical reason as well:
I knew I wanted RANGE to be a worker-owned cooperative before I knew whether we’d ever be able to afford a second staff member. RANGE needed to be a cooperative because I believe that journalists deserve to own a piece of the newsrooms they bleed for. More importantly for me, though: I have never wanted RANGE to live or die with me.
I wanted to build something that will grow with our community long past the time I’m gone from it. I want to retire — I want to go to my grave — knowing our city has a newsroom built to center those with the least power, a newsroom that trusts the journalists telling the community’s stories to also make the business decisions that best serve all of Spokane, not just a small clique of owners.
I believe that many (possibly most) of the biggest problems in society stem from individual people having too much power, and holding onto that power well past the time they can effectively and compassionately wield it. RANGE should be able to survive one team member leaving, no matter who that person is.
So how doomed is RANGE? Honestly, it’s not.
Or rather, it doesn’t have to be. This is not a huge, structural hole. It’s a short-term cash crisis. We’ve actually weathered an almost identical storm before, and it was our readers who got us through.
For all the doom and gloom surrounding journalism as an industry, RANGE has always been just a little bit profitable, even in our first year. It wasn’t an option not to be. Traditional lines of financing aren’t open to worker cooperatives and none of us have family money to lean on. We have always survived membership-to-membership, grant-to-grant.
In that context, even having a small profit on the books at the end of the year, doesn’t mean you might not still run out of cash in June.
Late spring and summer have always been challenging for us. Most of our grants have come at the beginning or the end of years. Our membership dollars follow the same path.
As the weather warms, fewer people open their email, and fewer people become members. 5,000-word investigations of corruption or union-busting or environmental neglect aren’t anyone’s idea of a light beach read.
You might remember that I wrote about our money struggles last August as well. Back then, we had a particular funder back out of support we had been planning on, and that sent us into crisis. I regret to report that shifting philanthropic priorities are now an industry-wide trend: far fewer institutions — from the biggest national philanthropies to regional and local foundations — are funding journalism in 2025 the way they have been for the decade leading up to today.
We planned for this. I’ve spent enough of my career doing grant-funded work that I’ve seen this happen before in arts spaces and even in sectors like aid for refugees. It’s why we’ve added a small number of advertisements. It’s why we made that silly/serious clothing line. It’s why we’re always hitting you up to become members.
That’s the silver lining here: the thing that saved us last August is the same thing that can save us today. When we told readers we needed “to dramatically increase our membership,” people listened! We went from being less than 20% reader-funded to over 30%. And one extremely generous donor, who has always wanted to remain anonymous, did something I never imagined: wrote a check for $30,000.
I knew we’d get some help. I would have felt irresponsible to expect that much.
All told, our community brought in $45,000. It was easily our most successful membership drive ever, and it kept us alive. That’s also roughly the same amount we need now.
RANGE just turned five years old. Almost half of businesses fail before they hit that milestone. I couldn’t find statistics for startup newsrooms, but I suspect the number is even higher. RANGE, by contrast, is doing great work and growing in every sense of the word.
We’re publishing more than we ever have. We have more members than we’ve ever had. We’re still winning grants. In fact: we have $100,000 of multi-year grants that will pay out starting in September. We just don’t have enough cash to get us through June, July and August.
It doesn’t have to all come at once, but it does need to come soon.
It doesn’t have to come from our readers, but there’s no one we trust more to come through for us.
Hey, it’s Val, RANGE’s Managing Editor, taking it from here.
Laying off the person who hired you is never something I thought I’d be doing, and in the wider journalism industry I’ve experienced, it’s always the opposite — don’t even get me started on the likelihood of a boss volunteering for it. But we’re worker-owned, and that means we all get a vote (even if Luke would’ve found a way to cut his cost to RANGE no matter what).
I joined RANGE at 26 years-old fresh off a 20-hour move from Southern California, burned out from daily news in LA County and hopeful for a future for local journalism that would be led by the people doing the work for their communities.
I found that future in Spokane at RANGE. I’ve found a home in this city and I’ve found a community here that cares about its people. And RANGE has all the right pieces to help it become even better — we just need to survive to get there.
So here’s how you can be part of making Spokane better for everyone.
Become a member of RANGE: This is a recurring membership, either monthly or yearly, that can be as low as $10 each month (cheaper than Netflix!). This helps us anticipate our revenue and plan our costs. Click here to join.
Give a tax-deductible donation: We’re not a non-profit, but we are fiscally sponsored, so if you have a chunk of money you don’t need, you can give it to the cause and make a big impact. Click here to give.
Become a sponsor: If you’re a business owner or organization that needs advertising, we have the space for it! You can sponsor our newsletters or buy display ads on our site. Reach out here.
Buy our merch: We don’t mean crappy water bottles with our logo on them, we mean shorts with “newsworthy” across the butt and actual cool stuff you’ll want to wear and use. Shop here.
Tell everyone about us: We know the economy is in flux at best and in shambles at worst and you have to be able to put food on the table. If you can’t afford to help in a monetary way, you can become a RANGE ambassador and tell your friends on social media and in person to sign up for our newsletter. (Our recent reader survey showed that 44% of our readers find out about us through word of mouth, so we KNOW y’all are effective!)
We know local news is better when the people who make it run the show and when the community we serve is at the center of everything we do. So let’s make it happen together.
