Rob Curley

It never gets any easier. But it also gets more and more rewarding each summer.

At 11 a.m. on Thursday, Olaf and his buddies will be ringing the Salvation Army bell in front of The Spokesman-Review building. And if you are in a really giving mood, you’ll get the coolest tour in Spokane with the best selfie this side of Arendelle.

For more than 140 years, The Spokane Daily Chronicle and The Spokesman-Review took all of their newspapers each month and bound them into massive books. Every page of every newspaper from each month of each year. A unique circumstance has made it so we now have two copies of each book. We’d like for you to have one.

They are from high schools across the area: Mead, Rogers, Deer Park and Lewis and Clark. Before coming together in The Spokesman-Review newsroom eight weeks ago, they had never met each other. Even those who were from the same schools. There aren’t many ways they could possibly be any more different from each other.

It costs more and more to subscribe to The Spokesman-Review but those increases are likely not for the reasons you might think. You deserve to not only know why this is happening, but also understand better why a subscription to your local newspaper matters more than it ever has.

Despite a pretty darn nice office located in one of the most beautiful resorts in Las Vegas, Deanna Pettit-Irestone isn’t ashamed to admit that she still gets a little homesick for Spokane. Pettit-Irestone makes it back to see her family in Eastern Washington and North Idaho a couple of times each year.

Look, we aren’t rookies here.

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

The Spokane Daily Chronicle was one of America’s last regional afternoon newspapers. It stopped publishing in 1992. If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to have an evening paper in Spokane now, the digital return of The Chronicle is about to show us all.

There isn’t a public high school in this area with a student newspaper. Or even a student news website. Or some instructor-led, Twitterific, Snapbookish thingiemabob that helps other students give their classmates updates about what’s going on around the school.