Latest news with #NorthwestPassages
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Publishers react to Spokesman-Review's nonprofit course -- served with beer -- at News Industry Mega Conference
Apr. 16—ORLANDO, Fla. — Newspaper executives took some of the first sips of an exclusive beer brewed by No-Li Brewhouse in partnership with The Spokesman-Review, an early case served at the News Industry Mega-Conference on Tuesday. Attendees drank the hazy IPA, named 1AB after the First Amendment, as they listened to a behind-the-curtain look at Northwest Passages book club events from Spokesman-Review Executive Editor Rob Curley. For the past six years, the live interviews have served as a vehicle to bring Spokanites together in consideration and conversation while also giving them a tangible relationship with their local newspaper, Curley told his day-drinking audience. Spokesman-Review staff are often at Northwest Passages events in their various capacities: covering the event, watching it on their own time, or interviewing the featured guest. It's good to have attendees see the people behind the bylines they read, Curley said. "The interviewer is one of either our reporters, editors or columnists, because we want the people who come to the events to see an act of journalism happen in front of them," Curley said. It's that relationship, fostered in part through Northwest Passages, that America's Newspapers CEO Dean Ridings said other publications could learn from and implement in their own communities. Ridings is working with Curley to create a "playbook" to make this happen. It's good for business and for people, he said. "The way that you engage with the community is fundamentally the most important thing that you're doing," Ridings said. "Whether a newspaper is for profit, not for profit, a hybrid or completely setting the model like you are doing now, you've got to have engagement. You've got to listen to your community. You've got to respond to your community. And I feel like you all are doing it off the charts." Though now exclusive to Spokane, Northwest Passages events are "hitting the road" and may soon be in other states. Leonard Woolsey, publisher for the Galveston County Daily News in Texas, thinks the event would fit right at home on his island community after he attended a Northwest Passages in Spokane featuring author and rancher Craig Johnson. "I stood up and turned around and looked backward, and what I saw were hundreds of people who shared a love for community and literature, and they were our readers; they were our people," Woolsey said. "It was like, 'This is a thread that pulls people together.' " Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sottile discusses New Age movements, women carving out influence, and the intersection in event promoting second novel
Apr. 3—Leah Sottile is no stranger to conspiracy theories, extremist beliefs and fringe views. It's the arena where she's made her bread and butter as a freelance journalist and the focus of her latest endeavor, "Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age." Inland Northwest residents packed the rooftop event center of the Steam Plant on Wednesday when Sottile discussed her second book delving into the world of New Age ideologies, folklore and personalities with reporter Emma Epperly as part of The Spokesman-Review's Northwest Passages series. "You hear that saying, 'If you go far enough to the right or far enough to the left, the ideas start to meet each other,' " Sottile said. "So as I keep talking about this book, it's like, this is the intersection point. This is where people who may present as really politically different find the shared ideas." The event was a reunion in more ways than one. For Sottile, it was a reunion with the Lilac City, where she began her journalism career at Gonzaga University and then the Inlander. For Epperly, it was a reunion with the newspaper where she covered public safety before joining Idaho Education News last fall. It was also a reunion between the pair, who last spoke in a public forum shortly after the publication of Sottile's first book, "When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times." The thoroughly reported novel examines the extreme religious beliefs held by the couple and how they fit into the landscape of extremism in the West, and served as a jumping-off point for the topic of discussion Wednesday, Sottile said. After writing her first book, Sottile said she decided she was ready for a break from reporting on extremism and wanted to write about trends that interested her. A Portland resident, Sottile said the markers of the New Age movement's popularity were evidenced in her walks around her hometown, which seems to feature "a crystal shop on every corner." "You can kind of get this vibe that this New Age thing is a really big deal, and so I started looking into it," Sottile said. "I'd heard a bit about this group called 'Love has Won' in Colorado, and before I knew it, I was writing another book about extremism." The new religious group Love Has Won, formerly called the Galactic Federation of Light, serves as a throughline for readers as Sottile explores the ideologies, people and trends that fall under the wide umbrella of the New Age movement. Sottile said it was hard to approach such a "loosey-goosey thing," with her usual approach rooted in concrete facts and figures, but she found herself gravitating toward exploring certain figures and questions, like the late Love Has Won leader Amy Carlson, and "how women find a place of standing for themselves in spirituality." Women tend to be more drawn to the movements than their counterparts, and Sottile said exploring female power tends to be a mainstay of her deep dives. She attributes it to her upbringing in the Catholic church where she admired the female saints, but at an older age realized women were not given much agency or power. "That kind of gave me some characters to concentrate on, and so I started to try to find what their shared ideas were," Sottile said. "You have people who believe in the lost civilization of Lemuria, you have people who use tarot cards and believe in aliens and that they're ascended God-like beings." Carlson was one of the former. She claimed to be a 27,000-year-old refugee from a long-lost land called Lemuria who was later reincarnated as several prominent figures like Joan of Arc and Marilyn Monroe. She's one of a number of New Age leaders Sottile explored dating back hundreds of years, claiming ties to mythological lost places like Atlantis or Lemuria. Sottile does not approach Carlson's story, or the many others contained in the book, as some may, with a chiding snicker or dismissive tone. Instead, she explores where New Age movements and leaders begin to cross the line into causing real harm, like any religious movement. One of Sottile's strengths is approaching topics with care and sincerity instead of the more dismissive reactions other reporters may have, she said. With coverage of the New Age movement, a lot has been surface level, or paints it more as "a joke, and less trying to understand why so many people are interested." "That's what I was trying to do, is try to understand people really believe this, and people really have believed this for a long time," Sottile said. "That's interesting to me. I think that that says something about spirituality. I think it says something about power. It says something about what people are seeking."
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Spokane students share the meaning of courage at Spokane Black Voices Symposium: 'Not dimming your light in effort of being scared to shine'
Feb. 10—Jeane Musesambili stood before the crowd and told them how she's "never known courage by its name." "But lately," she read from a poem she'd written, "I have learned to appreciate it in all its forms." The Spokane Community College student was one of 20 from area schools to present at the fourth annual Spokane Black Voices Symposium on Monday. Students shared poetry, paintings, dances and essays with the theme of "Powered by Courage." The Spokane Black Voices Symposium — which gives Black youth the center stage to express themselves through original art — is presented by the Black Lens newspaper and the Northwest Passages event series, along with collaboration with local school districts and Gonzaga University. For Musesambili, courage takes shape in myriad areas of her life . Most recently it manifests in standing "in front of people to tell your story," as she did at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center stage in front of a large crowd. "It's smiling even when all you want to do is cry. It's crying and never stopping," she read. "Courage is being able to own up to your mistakes and errors." Mwajuma Ishibaleka shared an essay about the ripple effects of courage. The Lewis and Clark senior often needs to summon courage in school, to overcome "suffocating fear" and impostor syndrome she feels when she's the only Black student in a class, as is often the case, she said. Feeling like the odd one out fueled a perception that she doesn't belong and stifled her desire to participate in school. "I remained silent and not contributing to the conversation," she read. "My fear was not solely rooted in my childhood silence, but also the overwhelming sense of impostor syndrome." Her academic performance suffered because of these feelings, until courage found her through the ripples made by mentors in school and finding community in her Black student union. "Courage is about being an example of fearlessness and change for those who are underrepresented, demonstrating that you can show up, speak up and make a meaningful impact. Courage is about remaining true to yourself and not dimming your light in effort of being scared to shine." Shadle Park senior Jase Bower shared a vulnerable story about a time of tremendous loss in his life. A friend died by suicide during Bower's freshman year, spiraling him into depression, and he lost interest in school. A year later, two young cousins died unexpectedly, and he grappled with mortality at a young age. "This experience allowed me to find different perspectives about life," Bower read. "It made me not want to take life for granted, because life is too short to have doubts." For him, it took courage to ask for help, to build a village around himself and lean on those people in times of strife, rather than try to take on everything by himself. "The biggest courage is letting people in at your most vulnerable point to let them help you," Bower said. "A big thing for me is community and the village that people create, and that's just a big part of who we are as people." While Bower summoned courage to turn to others, Liberty High School senior Z'Hanie Weaver needed bravery to center herself, to break generational cycles and uplift her own goals. She wrote about often being expected to sacrifice parts of herself and her feeling of comfort and self-determination for those in her family. "The connection of my blood tied me to my family and culture, but left my boundaries wounded, continuing a cycle of a wrong sense of generational love," she read from her essay. Centering herself in her own life required courage, she said. She's the first in her family who will go to college, and she learned on the drive to the symposium she'd been accepted with a full ride into her top school, Hamilton College in New York. She wrote in her essay about writing as a means to build courage and find empowerment, to center herself and reclaim her voice through the written word. Weaver is a contributing writer in The Black Lens newspaper and worked at The Spokesman-Review as part of the newspaper's Teen Journalism Institute. As she breaks generational cycles, she hopes to bring positivity back to her community and the kids growing up behind her. "I want to put back into my community," Weaver said, "to replace the hardships that I've experienced and possibly the negative interactions that have been put out towards me, to replace them with good, positive opportunities for other kids." Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
