Job details
- Start Date: July 2023
- Salary: $45,000 – $55,000 per year
- Hours: Full-time, 40 hours, approximately 5 days per week, flexible schedule
- Benefits: Healthcare (Range pays 80% of your coverage & 50% for dependents), Simple IRA w/ employer match, profit share, Washington State Paid Family and Medical Leave
- Time Off: Three weeks paid time off per year, paid holidays, and we also take the final week of the year off to rest.
- Location: Spokane, Washington with flexibility to work from home or at our office.
Application details
Please apply here and submit the following by 11:59 p.m. PST on June 14, 2023
- Your resume
- Contact information for two (2) references
- Relevant work examples (if available, no more than three clips please)
- Answers to the included short-answer questions
Note: Please do not submit a cover letter.
We expect to hold interviews beginning June 19, and will notify candidates about our decision or provide updates on the process by June 30.
Our mission and how you fit
RANGE Media is a worker-owned newsroom that is part of the Spokane Workers Cooperative (SWC), an ecosystem of worker-owned businesses that share resources and expertise.
At RANGE, we believe that our democracy works best when all of us participate, and that can only be possible when everyone has equal access to the news and information that allows them to take action and demand better for themselves and their communities. We are building a journalism organization in Spokane, WA and the greater Inland Northwest to meet the needs of everyone, with special emphasis on people and communities that have been ignored by traditional media and affected by injustice in all its forms.
Launched weeks into the pandemic, we’ve spent the last three years building RANGE from the ground up, growing from one guy making a podcast in his attic to a team of three journalists (and soon five!) who do crucial investigative, accountability, and civics reporting that gives our community the tools they need to demand better.
Our most popular product, our CIVICS newsletter, breaks down dozens of municipal meeting agendas so people know when and where to speak truth to power, whether it’s at city council meetings, school board meetings, the health district or the bicycle advisory board.
The Civics Editor will oversee this product, which entails tracking the public meetings in our area to find the most impactful discussions and votes each week. The Civics Editor will also lead the launch of our Documenters program, where we train and pay community members to attend and document public meetings, then publish an accessible, approachable digest of the meeting. RANGE is the first newsroom in the Northwest to join the program.
The Civics Editor role is vital to our vision of community journalism in Spokane (Read more about RANGE at the bottom of this description). That’s why we’re seeking someone with a passion for journalism that highlights the concerns of everyday people, amplifies the voices of marginalized communities, and who can help make our CIVICS work as impactful as possible.
The ideal candidate loves to be part of a team, loves to help people feel like they’re part of a community, and wants to help build our organizational and missional impact by getting more people civically engaged and involved with Inland Northwest Documenters. To learn more about the Documenters program and the support they provide news organizations like ours, check out our program announcement.
We’re trying to build something this community has never had, and as such, we are committed to learning, growing and, ultimately, succeeding together.
What you’ll do
This role is responsible for expanding our CIVICS work and managing our Documenters program. You’ll:
- Manage the Spokane-based Documenters program and oversee our local network of program participants. This includes recruiting and training community members.
- Write our weekly CIVICS newsletter and bring it to the next level
- Edit Documenters notes for publication
- Work with our Audience and Membership Editor to host events for training and recruitment
- Work with RANGE staff to tell the story of the Documenters program and make sure Documenters’ work reaches the people who can use it
- Apply an equity framework to programmatic decisions to ensure the Documenters program reflects the greatest need as it applies to race, gender and other demographics.
- Collaborate with a small team, helping us actualize the mission of RANGE through the specific lens of empowering our community
Beyond benefits
- FLEXIBILITY: A flexible work environment & schedule with plenty of autonomy to do your best work.
- IMPACT: The opportunity to meaningfully shape a growing community news organization.
- MEANING: A foundational role in an organization that exists to support the people news organizations traditionally leave behind, and help bring more people into meaningful civic engagement.
- OWNERSHIP: RANGE is a worker-owned cooperative. We are building something special together and we believe everyone deserves a share in its prosperity.
Your qualifications and approach
We’re looking for a results-oriented, creative thinker who likes working with passionate people in a collaborative environment and is dedicated to learning and continuous improvement.
There are no minimum education or experience requirements, but this is an editor role and the candidate should have some professional experience in a role that required writing and professional communication, and/or in community organizing.
That can mean a lot of things. Maybe you’re a reporter who’s excited about teaching others. Maybe you’ve been in a communications job but are looking for an opportunity to be closer to the community and out from under bureaucracy. Maybe you’re a community organizer who really knows how to connect with and build relationships with people. Bring it on!
A quick note: We will be hiring a reporter role in a few months that may be better for candidates with less experience.
Beneficial Skills and Experience
- Experience in engagement journalism, community and/or grassroots organizing, or a related field.
- Experience managing a team and/or leading projects where people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and abilities feel they can do their best work.
- Skills: Project planning and prioritization, strong verbal and written communication, collaboration
- A passion for accountability reporting
- A passion for equipping and organizing people toward collective action
- A real desire to make sure products designed to help people are working well
- A drive to help early-stage organizations grow, learn, operationalize & generally kick ass
- Must be willing to learn and utilize the following tools: Slack, Google Drive, Canva and WordPress
- Fluency in Spanish is a huge plus
EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!
Some great candidates might not check all these boxes or they may hold important skills we haven’t listed. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself and how you could make a difference in this role.
Our mission is to amplify marginalized voices and the needs of overlooked communities, and we strongly encourage members of those communities to apply, including Black, Indigenous and people of color, LGBTQIA2S+ people, women, people with disabilities and those who grew up in or are currently experiencing poverty.
Application timeline
- Our initial application includes brief answers to three questions, plus your résumé and work samples. All applicants will receive responses, whether you move forward or not.
- The next stage is a 20-minute virtual interview.
- Within five days, applicants will be notified if they have proceeded to the final interview stage.
- We plan to make the final decision and inform candidates by June 30.
- The chosen Civics Editor will begin in July 2023.
A little more about us
RANGE is a media organization for people who love the Inland Northwest and want to make it better. We are creating an anti-racist, anti-colonial, class-focused newsroom from the ground up. Our mission is to report as close to people’s lived experiences as possible and directly serve the needs of community members at the margins while providing all news consumers with powerful storytelling from angles traditional news outlets either can’t access or ignore.
We believe that when journalism really focuses on lifting traditionally marginalized and disregarded people — helping them get informed, take action and find their voice — journalism has the power to transform communities. We’re testing that theory right now, in Spokane.
We are a small but growing team dedicated to a model of distributed leadership known as holacracy. RANGE itself is nested within the Spokane Workers Cooperative, an ecosystem of other worker-owned businesses that share resources and expertise.
We embrace remote work and also believe deeply in face-to-face interactions, problem solving and team-building. As such: we encourage working from home and we also keep an office at a beautiful local coworking space for when you need head-down focus time or heads-up brainstorming and discussion time.
RANGE just celebrated three years of existence and our team is built of passionate journalists — some of whom have been working in the Spokane community for decades and some who are new to Spokane but equally in love with it. We live here, we love it dearly, and we have a clear vision of how an independent press focused on the needs of normal people can change this place for the better.
We are tremendously excited to be welcoming this role onto our team! If this role sounds like what you want to do, please apply here!
