RANGE

The pod is back for the next time, for the last time. And this time, we are pulling back the curtain! 

The old format was a lot to pull off each week, so we’re brainstorming ways to make it happen consistently.

Join host Luke Baumgarten and the rest of the RANGE crew, Val Osier, Erin Sellers & Aaron Hedge, as they go on a fantastic voyage into the life of the journalistic mind, brainstorming new segment ideas and discussing the unique powers of audio journalism to engage with listeners, inform our community and do atmospheric storytelling — which is to say we talk about podcast stuff we like and how to make it happen with the small, mighty team we have. 

We also discuss a shift we’re trying to make across everything we do at RANGE to get more reader and listener engagement, and more directly let your questions and concerns shape our reporting. Scroll down for more on that. 

Next, we tested out one of our segment ideas, The Fact Check, before concluding with a quick interview with Howl Hall on the Mifepristone Supreme Court case and what it’s been like for Hall, a graduating senior at The Community School to team up with RANGE to produce journalism that is important to him and his classmates. 

This episode is half brainstorm, half experimentation, two-thirds Luke remembers how to edit audio and 3/5ths he learns a new software. We aren’t mathematicians, but that’s like over 2 podcasts for the price (free) of 1.

It turned out … better than expected? We’ll let you be the judge.

LET US KNOW

Seriously: we really want to know what you think of the new ideas and plan. 

• Send us an email (or a voice clip!) at [email protected]
• Leave Luke a voicemail at 509-508-1055. 
• Fill out our survey in the show notes RIGHT HERE. 

We cannot stress this enough: We want your ideas for segments. We want you to ask us questions. We will answer them. We might even turn them into stories. We want to know what you want to know. 

If we know about what you want to know, we'll tell you about it. If we don't know about it, we might report it out!

We're a small team, but we care about the things that you care about. And we're going to do it all. We're going to talk about it all because from here on out, Range is living out loud.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 Cold Open 
• 00:09 Intro
• 05:18 Segment 1: How do we want to do this thing?
• 08:17 Belated Introductions
• 36:06 Segment 2: Pride mural good-faith fact check
• 43:43 Segment 3: Mifepristone explainer feat. Howl Hall
• 44:52 Segment 3
• 01:06:53 Outro
• 01:07:52 ???

Welcome to a place where dead dogs, communion wafers, pipe diameters and fluoride in the water live alongside important ongoing public testimony about the conduct of public officials and the ramifications of legislation passed by Spokane’s City Council.

The Open Forum period at Spokane City Council meetings is a land of contrasts, playing host to a number of topics that, at first glance, might seem random or irrelevant.

But for some activists and community members, the open forum period exists as a critical method of engagement with the city officials who hold power in Spokane.

Last Monday, the council voted through a new set of rules for 2024, which included some sweeping changes to the way open forum is conducted. Council members say the goal of these changes is to prioritize time-sensitive city business and increase civic engagement, but activists fear they will limit free speech.

Join host Luke Baumgarten as he interviews two city hall journalists, The Inlander's Nate Sanford and RANGE's own Erin Sellers, about the ins-and-outs of the controversial new rules and their possible implications.

With temperatures climbing into the 90s in May and wildfire smoke already fouling air quality in some areas of the Northwest, RANGE wanted to learn more about what this unseasonably warm weather means for the rest of summer, the risks of heat-related illness in our community and the role climate change plays in driving extreme weather.

So, RANGE out to Dr. Brian G. Henning, the Director of Gonzaga Center for Climate, Society, and the Environment and a professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Gonzaga University.

You’ll hear Dr. Henning talk about the importance of a healthy urban canopy — a dense urban canopy — to reduce what scientists call heat islands. Heat islands are hotspots in cities where rather than sunlight being absorbed by trees and used to power photosynthesis, which creates oxygen, and keeps ground temperatures cool, there are fewer or perhaps zero trees. So the heat reaches the ground, is absorbed by the concrete and asphalt, and that heat radiates, creating temperatures that are 14 degrees hotter in say, Hillyard than the tree-lined streets of the South Hill. 

Trees in Spokane will not fix climate change. Climate change is a global crisis that will require a global solution. But trees can help mitigate the local effects of that global crisis. And we need to do it now, because trees don’t grow to maturity over night. 

So then the obvious question is: what can we do today to help our neighbors survive and make our neighborhoods more resilient while we wait 20 years for that tree cover to grow? And what other steps can we take?

All that and more in this episode.

Today, on a brief trip to Spokane to visit Thrive International and the Podium sports complex, Gov. Jay Inslee visited the RANGE office for a half-hour interview. The interview, like much of our coverage, focused on key areas of concern for Spokane: homelessness, affordable housing and behavioral health.

Gov. Inslee repeatedly called for increased investment in home building from the state legislature and even direct housing development by the state.

He also touted his connections to Eastern Washington, called for additional investments and initiatives to bolster the state’s behavioral health workforce, and called attention to conflict with neighboring Idaho over the state’s support of the women’s right to abortion.

We’re back at you with a whole new podcast episode and it’s only been … five months? We’re still figuring out how to carve a sustainable podcast with all of our reporting work and limited staff, but we’ve missed you — and we know you missed Luke’s buttery podcast voice — so we have a special episode!

In November, we hosted our first-ever live podcast recording at the Central Library, where we got a panel together to talk about Ranked Choice Voting, and the attendees got to ask questions. 

Marilyn Darilek from League of Women Voters Spokane and Trenton Miller from FairVote WA joined Luke on stage to explain the ins and outs of Ranked Choice Voting and share about the process to get it adopted in municipalities all over the state. We even held a mock Ranked Choice Vote election on quality seasonal pies. 

Given how strongly people feel about pumpkin, apple and pecan, it was remarkably civil!

Real quick: what is Ranked Choice Voting?

In our current voting system, you get to place one vote for one person in any given election. Your only alternative to voting for one person is to vote for no one. Plenty of political scientists believe this system all but guarantees a two-party dominant system — and that is certainly how it has played out in America. 

In ranked choice voting, though, as we’ll hear explained in detail, you get to pick several candidates in order from the person you like the most to the person you like the least. And if you loathe someone so much, you can just not rank them at all.

If your top choice has a chance of winning, that vote stays. If your top choice gets eliminated, your second choice gets your vote and so on, until one candidate has 50% plus 1 vote. 

It’s up to each of us to decide if RCV is something we want to fight for, but at the very least we should recognize the shortcomings of our current system. 

If you hear yourself saying “I like this person, but they can’t win, so I won’t vote for them” — then our system of voting is not working for you. 

Of course that doesn’t mean your candidate will always win. But shouldn’t we have a system where the best thing you can possibly do as a citizen is say, “I believe this is the best person to lead us, and that’s who I’m going to vote for?”

People who study ranked choice voting elsewhere believe that it leads to more pluralistic elections: there’s room for more parties and more political viewpoints when you can rank your favorites rather than voting for just one.

And even if the two parties stick around for a while, the immediate benefit of ranked choice voting is that you still get to have a vote be a truer and more nuanced representation of your opinion about a race — and therefore a more nuanced representation of how you think this city, this county, this state, this nation, ought to be run — without feeling like you’re throwing away your vote on a candidate who is too good to be elected. 

The event went off without a hitch, and we look forward to doing many more.

MASSIVE THANKS to our guests Marilyn Darilek from League of Women Voters and Trenton Miller from FairVote WA, and our friends at the Spokane Public Library who made this event possible: Shane Gronholz, Vanessa Strange, Andy Rumsey and Jason Johnson.

We’re back with the third installment in our RANGE of Care miniseries on productive disagreements at an interpersonal level and a societal level through the lens of family therapy and restorative justice.

This began as a conversation about how to have productive disagreements and quickly became a discussion about how do we change our criminal legal system, and maybe on our way to that needing to change our entire society and how we relate to each other—a small order, right?

Meg and Luke are joined again by Inga Laurent, Professor of Law at Gonzaga who studies, theorizes and helps implement restorative justice practices in court systems and schools.

Inga and Meg talk about tools we can use in order to reconcile with one another and keep ourselves mentally safe.

Today on the pod, we have the second part of our conversation with Daniel Walters. 

Last week we spent a lot of time breaking down the chronology of how the June 11 anti-Pride event was conceived and initially promoted locally, but how “local” in the case of North Idaho now includes an increasing number of far-right celebrities.

This week we discuss how, just as the pot seemed likely to boil over, all sides took a step back — tweaking their plans to de-escalate — and how that might have been the difference between what actually happened and something deadlier. 

We also discuss the way these things get covered by the media: does the far-right get over-covered? Or do larger outlets only pay attention to the Inland Northwest when people like Matt Shea are involved? 

Read Daniel’s story here.

Today on the pod, The Inlander’s Daniel Walters joins us to talk about the many groups, YouTube celebrities, and far-right hype people who brought the June 11 counter-demonstration against Coeur d’Alene’s Pride in the Park near to a boiling point. This event led to 31 Patriot Front members getting arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to riot, including at least two men with ties to far-right pastor Matt Shea.

There’s A LOT to unpack here, so we’re cutting the discussion up into two parts. 

We wanted to go through it methodically as an opportunity to document not just the people actively shaping politics in Kootenai County and the broader Inland Northwest, but the people who are promoting the region to hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. 

So buckle up for part one of a discussion of all the connections, alliances and squabbles of a region that has real importance for many different ideologies and groups across the spectrum: from conservative to libertarian to far-right. 

Read Daniel’s story here.

At a lot of media companies, the crime beat is new reporter purgatory. This is probably your first job out of college: listen to scanner traffic and when something newsworthy happens, you run out and report it.  

In one sense, it’s journalism on easy mode — the stories literally come to you — and in that sense, it’s understandable to put a young reporter on it. But that inexperience creates a real imbalance between the journalist and power, asking the least experienced writers to hold their own against career law enforcement bureaucrats and professional communicators. And because there’s so much to cover, new reporters often only have time to get the police account of things, and rarely get a chance to actually follow up to see if the person arrested actually ends up facing trial.

You’re going to hear from two different young reporters, Rebecca White from KPBX and Valerie Osier, on the effects of this, and why, for the health of our communities and the mental health of young reporters, the crime beat has to go.

The Inland Northwest offers a unique glimpse into the future of the rest of the US in light of the expected overturn of Roe v. Wade & Planned Parenthood v. Casey, two landmark Supreme Court decisions that codified the federal right to an abortion. 

This is because there already aren’t any abortion clinics in North Idaho, so many abortion-seekers as far away as western Montana need to go over the border to Eastern Washington clinics. For years, over 40% of patients seeking abortions at border clinics run by Planned Parenthood have been from out of state. Recently, that number has jumped to over 50%. 

We talked to friend of the pod & Inlander reporter Samantha Wohlfeil about her recent cover story, "My Body, State's Choice?" what additional work Washington abortion clinics are preparing for the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

Follow Samantha on Twitter.