On this Giving Tuesday, you have the power to make a difference and help us continue to bridge the gap in local journalism. Northwest Passages is here to ensure Spokane’s stories are told, discussed, and celebrated, no matter where the headlines take us.
As traditional media fades, we step up to fill the gap — offering a space for local voices, inspiring events, and creative discussions. Your gift helps fund the journalism and community-building programs that keep our democracy healthy. Together, we can create a community where ideas flourish and connections grow.
Supporting all of this is as simple as making a donation below, which goes 100 percent to fund the missions of our newsroom and our Northwest Passages commununity events series:
If you’d like to make a tax-deductible gift using appreciated securities/stock or a DAF, QCD or RMD, please contact Comma's development director, Yvonne Esquibel Smith, via email at yvonne@comma.cm or by calling her at 509-220-0454.
Letter from Rob Curley
11:07
Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024
Over the last seven years, you have made Northwest Passages one of the largest local event series in the United States. We can’t believe it, either. And along the way, you’ve also helped us create one of the most unique newsrooms in the nation — funding nearly 30 percent of the payroll of The Spokesman-Review’s newsroom, but in a way that allows any news organization in the Pacific Northwest to use those stories at no cost, and ensures that this community-funded content is available to all readers for free.
Your support has made us the smallest news organization in the world with D.C. bureau, allowing us to cover national politics through the eyes of our region, as well as the smallest U.S.-based newspaper to send a reporter to cover the Ukraine war, only through the powerful perspective of our community’s own, large Ukrainian population. It’s given our region rural reporters who break important stories that simply wouldn’t have been reported without your help, and lets us continue to have a statehouse bureau, a local health reporter and a reporter to cover our community’s education needs. It’s even allowed us to have the only paid high school journalism internship program in the country.
Then there are our incredibly popular local events that started it all … and that are still very much at the heart of our mission.
There’s a reason other newspapers continually call us to try to understand how Northwest Passages has become so successful. Just as we’ve done for the past seven years, 2024 saw some of the most important authors in the country come to Spokane to discuss subjects as wide ranging as modern health care issues and ripoffs, to sustainable conservation strategies that are practical instead instead of just inconvenient, and even a smart look at the role religion plays in modern politics. Then there were the New York Times-bestselling authors like Stephanie Land, Jonathan Evison, Rene Denfeld and Craig Johnson who all held fun and enlightening conversations with our readers. Or the night we partied like 1999 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Gonzaga basketball’s first Elite Eight team. And with this being such an important election year, Northwest Passages hosted the most amount of election debates in our history, including one of the only in-person U.S. Senate debates in the nation.
It’s all pretty unprecedented stuff, and we all are so proud to be in a community that still cares so deeply about local journalism.
On this Giving Tuesday, you have the power to make a difference. Northwest Passages is here to ensure stories across Eastern Washington and North Idaho are told, discussed and celebrated — no matter where the headlines take us. As traditional media across the nation continues to struggle, with nearly three newspapers closing a week in 2023, this community has stepped up to fill the gap here in Spokane in ways that in ways that others across the news industry now point to as a real example of how local journalism can be saved at the grassroots level … so much so that we have now earned our own 501c3 status.
Like I said, we’re working together to build something that is unprecedented.
Your Giving Tuesday gift helps all of this not only continue, but to grow, by funding essential local journalism and our community-building events that work hand-in-hand to keep our democracy healthy. Together, we are creating a community where ideas flourish and connections grow.
Now, all you have to do is click this link! Or you can contact our Development Officer — Yvonne Esquibel Smith — if you’d like to make a tax-deductive gift using appreciated securities/stock or a DAF, QCD or RMD. Yvonne can be reached at 509-220-0454 or via email at yvonne@comma.cm.
Your support has meant more to me — and to all of the local journalists who are a part of this amazing newsroom — than you can possibly know. The wild part is that we’re just getting started! Much bigger things lie ahead. We can’t wait for you to see all of the things we will do together in 2025. They’re important and powerful enough that some of these 2025 projects will be replicated in other communities across the nation that also want to save and protect their local newspaper.
And, of course, it all will have started here in Spokane. Because that’s what our community does. Thank you so much for your support of local journalism!
Very sincerely,
Rob Curley Executive Editor/The Spokesman-Review Founder/Comma community journalism lab robc@spokesman.com 509-459-5590