Save RANGE: A press for the people needs the people’s support

Hey, it’s Luke. This isn’t a message I ever wanted to write. I hate when news organizations (or politicians for that matter) use scare tactics to raise money. We will die without your support! Democracy will end!

I’m not going to do that, but I do need to be honest: the grant funding we rely on to make ends meet has dropped significantly this year. To make up the difference, RANGE needs hundreds of readers to become members at $10/month.

That’s the headline, but I want to dig a little deeper. RANGE’s commitment to transparency goes beyond the way we report and the way we work with readers to answer your pressing questions. Transparency, for us, includes letting people who care about our work know what it really takes to make us sustainable, and giving you a chance to help.

All that is below, including audio of me talking about our needs and our plans, in case you don’t want to read the whole email .

I’m putting the membership button here in case you know right away that you want to help:

Please take a couple minutes to read or listen below.

We deeply appreciate your curiosity and passion for Spokane and our work, and being transparent about all of it is how we hope to repay your loyalty. Also: feel free to email me personally with any questions, concerns or ideas: luke@rangemedia.co . I’m serious. Reach out.

Okay, here’s where we’re at:

Our goal for RANGE has always been to be 100% member-funded, so we can keep our focus on the communities and people who need our work the most. We want to be beholden to our readers and no one else .

None of our team comes from wealth, though, and as a worker-owned cooperative, investment capital is hard to come by. So: to build the newsroom I really hope you love — and the newsroom we know Spokane and the Inland Northwest needs — we have always supplemented your membership dollars by writing a lot of grants. (I wrote 23 last year. I’m still tired.)

Until we reach our magical member-sustainability number, we rely on those grants to pick up the slack. And it’s a lot of slack.

Our 513 amazing members support the equivalent of 1 of our 4 journalists.

First of all: that is a tremendous accomplishment. Most startup newsrooms never get to 500 members. But that means our small team is about 80% funded by grants (with a couple really generous donations from community members in there as well).

From 2020 to the end of last year, that mix worked .

That mix helped our team quadruple in size since 2021 and we publish 10-times more stories now than we did then. Our reach and impact have grown in a spookily similar way: our readership has grown 10-fold and our membership quadrupled as well. We only win a fraction of the grants we submit, but still: foundations have always come through with just enough to balance the books.

In the coming weeks we’re going to be sharing RANGE’s impacts, so I won’t waste time here counting all of the times just this year we’ve made a difference.

Just know: it has felt so satisfying to work hard, build trust with our communities, tell amazing stories, hold powerful people accountable and get to the end of the year with a little bit of money in the bank, so we can keep going.

Seven months into 2024, I’m worried that isn’t going to happen this year. Here’s why:

As of today, we’ve been awarded $50,000 fewer grant dollars than this time last year. By the end of the year, it’s looking like we could be about $115,000 behind what we earned in 2023.

I’m going to keep writing grants, but this is bigger than Spokane or RANGE. Every newsroom leader I talk to says their grants are down, too. Tech companies were giving grants to newsrooms. Civil society foundations were as well. We got money from both over the years. That money doesn’t exist anymore. Philanthropies have shifted their priorities nation-wide.

And you know what? That’s okay. It might even be good.

I said earlier I never wanted us to rely on grants, and now it’s clear, we can’t afford to any more. RANGE is hard hitting news for the people of Spokane, and we need the people of Spokane to support it.

I am worried about where we are financially right now, but I am extremely confident in our team and extremely confident in RANGE’s future plans. Maybe most of all, I am extremely confident in our readers and the people of the Inland Northwest in general.

I have personally been very blessed in my career to be a part of some really amazing things like Terrain and Feast World Kitchen. Things like that don’t exist most places — especially not relatively poor midsized cities.

They exist in Spokane, because Spokane steps up to support the weird, the hard, the powerful things its community members do.

Range is a worker coop, so yeah, that makes us weird, and journalism is hard, but the impact is powerful — it’s seismic .

So we’re ringing the alarm now, and asking for the same Spokane that shows up for those things to show up for RANGE.

And the great thing about membership money, compared with grants : it sticks around.

The money we raise today is going to help us survive this year and leave us on a stronger, more stable footing for 2025 and beyond.

Some of you know I used to work at the Inlander. I never wanted to leave that job. After 8 years, I just couldn’t keep it up financially.

Now that we have RANGE, and we have committed to being a newsroom that passionate journalists can afford to stay at for their careers, I want this to be the last job I ever do.

And I know we can get there.

So, first of all: if you love RANGE and get value from RANGE, but you can’t afford to become a member, please, keep reading our work. We have never and we will never paywall our content because we never want anyone to have to make a choice between staying informed about the community they love and putting food on the table.

But if you can support us, please become a member today.

If you can do $10 a month, that’s amazing.
If you can do $25 a month, I will give you a standing ovation.
If you can do $50 a month, Val is going to have to stop me from coming to your house to give you a hug.

If you can afford to give more, we have a philanthropic partner who can make that gift tax-deductible. Just send me an email and we’ll get it sorted out.

We are also going to start offering a small number of sponsorships, so If you run a business or organization you think RANGE readers need to know about, send me an email about that, too.

I’ll leave you with this: the only way community news survives is if the community supports it.

The Spokane area is better with you in it, and it’s better with RANGE covering it.

Thank you for your readership and your support.

Luke_

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