Rob Curley: Big changes ahead in 2022 for The Spokesman-Review

Not that it seems possible, but Year 2 of the modern pandemic era actually felt even more eventful than the first.

That was definitely the case in The Spokesman-Review newsroom. It was an unprecedented year in so many ways, but that doesn’t mean we’re just waiting to see what 2022 brings us. We have plans that are already in progress.

But first, let’s talk about what happened in 2021.

One of the first big changes The Spokesman-Review made last year was to substantially increase the amount of Further Review pages that we ran each week. Charles Apple’s incredibly popular work not only showed up a whole lot more in our newspaper, but continued to be picked up by more newspapers across the nation.

With the help of Bank of America and the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund, The Spokesman-Review launched one of the only paid high school journalism internships in the nation, the Teen Journalism Institute. When the summer was over, we didn’t want these great students to leave our newsroom, which is why you still see their photos and read their stories in our newspaper. Only now, it’s their after-school job.

Bank of America’s generous funding will allow the Teen Journalism Institute to continue for years, so be on the lookout as we open the application process for the 2022 class soon.

Just about a year ago, we began our weekly “We The People” civics project aimed at explaining what the Constitution and Bill of Rights really say and mean, with a focus on helping people understand just how difficult the U.S. naturalization citizenship test really is.

In the summer, we brought back to life our long-gone sister newspaper, the Spokane Daily Chronicle, as an evening e-edition each weekday at 6 p.m. The reaction from readers blew us away, even making The Chronicle one of the state’s most-read “newspapers” on many days.

In 2022, some of the changes that are planned for The Chronicle include even more local content, including Gonzaga basketball stories that are only available on your digital doorstep.

Speaking of sports, The Spokesman-Review’s sport section was named one of the Associated Press’ “Grand Slam” winners in 2021. That means sports editors from across the nation picked The Spokesman-Review as a winner for best daily sports section, best sports special section, best Sunday sports page and best sports website.

It was the first time in the newspaper’s history that it won the prestigious, and rare, distinction from the AP.

But the biggest change to our newsroom was the hiring of Amber D. Dodd as the first Carl Maxey Racial and Social Inequity reporter. This new position was funded 100% by local donors, including the Michael Conley Charitable Fund through the Innovia Foundation, with the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund then more than matching the initial donation as well as several others from across our community adding to the funding.

This newsroom position was the first of its kind in the nation, as this journalist would report jointly to the editors of both The Spokesman-Review and The Black Lens, with Dodd’s work appearing in both publications.

But it doesn’t stop there. Her work could actually be published anywhere. As is the case with all of The Spokesman-Review’s grant-funded reporters, Dodd’s work carries a Creative Commons license, meaning it can be published by any organization and cannot be behind any sort of online paywall. The work by all of The Spokesman-Review’s grant-funded journalists is essentially owned by this community.

And those other grant-funded positions continued to make a real difference in news coverage across Eastern Washington.

With the funding of the newspaper’s first Report For America grant position – a rural health reporter – reduced to just 20%, the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund stepped in to fund the rest of the position for its final year.

Local funding for the newspaper’s other Report For America positions was equally impressive as the Innovia Foundation, Numerica, Avista and hundreds of members of our community completed the funding needed for the newspaper’s new statehouse reporter in Olympia, as well as the state’s only Washington, D.C.-based reporter.

So, what are we working on for 2022?

One of the first changes of the year will happen in Friday’s edition of the paper, as Kiantha Duncan becomes our newspaper’s newest local opinion columnist.

If you’ve ever heard the president of the Spokane NAACP speak, or have read any of her writing, you know why. She is a fireball whose intelligence and wit are only rivaled by her passion and ability to bring people together.

Duncan also will continue to be involved in the newspaper’s incredibly popular community events series, Northwest Passages. Her conversation with Sundee Frazier at a Northwest Passage’s talk in October immediately became one of the series’ most popular and powerful events.

Another change for 2022 is that our relationship with The Black Lens will continue to grow.

Just like last year, The Black Lens will be an important part of our Sunday newspapers several times a year, but now will include an emphasis on enterprise and investigative stories as our community’s Black newspaper and The Spokesman-Review collaborate to dig deeper into some of the biggest issues and stories across our region related to racial and social equity.

Like most newspapers across the country, The Spokesman-Review’s feature pages have changed many times over the years. And not always for the better.

Over the next few months, the name of our features pages will change from the unintentionally ambiguous “Today” to the intentionally delightful “Serendipity.” Of all of the sections of our newspaper that should be filled with daily surprises, it’s the features pages.

About two years ago, we launched a new weekly section that appeared in the Wednesday newspaper called Serendipity. It was one of the first places that our Further Review pages began showing up on a regular basis, along with stories you just couldn’t imagine being in any other section of the paper.

It is that sort of playfulness and the spirit of finding things you didn’t know you were looking for that we wanted to infuse even deeper into the DNA of The Spokesman-Review.

None of the things you love about our features pages are going to go away. The columns you love will still be there. Same with the puzzles. Same with the great recipes in our Wednesday papers. And definitely the comics.

The coolest change to our features pages is that they will soon return seven days a week.

Three or four years ago, The Spokesman-Review stopped running features pages in the Tuesday newspaper. In the spring of 2020, when our newspaper quit publishing a printed edition on Saturdays, a second day of the week also lost its features pages.

Before March Madness gets here, both our Tuesday and Saturday editions will see the return of their feature pages.

If we could figure out a way to bring back the Spokane Daily Chronicle, surely we could figure out how to do this. And we did. (Just don’t tell our publisher, because we didn’t really ask.)

The last big change for 2022 will be the addition of our fourth Report For America grant-funded reporter this summer.

As the news industry has changed, more and more areas have become “news deserts” – regions with little to no news coverage. One additional reporter can’t fix that in Eastern Washington and North Idaho. But it’s a step in the right direction.

This new reporter position will focus on the undercovered counties directly adjacent to Spokane County in Washington and Idaho.

That’s just a few of the new things that The Spokesman-Review newsroom will be up to in 2022. Please know that our newsroom is so grateful for your support of our local journalism through your subscription.

And you can see, we plan to work just as hard for you this year.