Membership & Marketing
Manager

Our mission

RANGE Media is a worker-owned newsroom in Spokane, Washington, building an anti-racist, decolonial, class-focused approach to local journalism. We exist to put the tools of civic engagement, accountability, and self-determination back in the hands of the people our region's institutions have historically left behind — Black, Indigenous, and people of color; LGBTQIA2S+ folks; immigrants and refugees; working-class people; rural people; and anyone else who has been told the news is not for them.

For over six years, we have thrived as a member-supported, free-to-all publication. We have grown more than 6x in revenue and in staff. We have held some of our region's most powerful institutions to account. And we have done it while being profitable every single year, supported by a fiercely loyal community of readers, members, and key institutional partners.

Why this role exists

That community is the floor we are now building from. The next chapter of RANGE is turning the trust we have earned into a sustainable stream of revenue that will allow us to grow at a pace dictated by our community, not philanthropic whims.

That is where you come in.

About this role

The Membership & Marketing Manager is the first person at RANGE whose full-time job is to grow our audience and convert that audience into members. You will own membership end-to-end and act as the business voice of our marketing. You will also project-manage the rest of our revenue work — events, merch, ads, sponsorships — as team sprints with the rest of us pitching in.

This is a startup role. RANGE is six years old and profitable, but we are only just building a dedicated business team. The job will be roughly 80% marketing and membership work and 20% project management and helping the rest of the team stay on track. Some weeks will be a membership campaign. Some weeks will be a merch sprint. Some weeks we will need someone who can roll up their sleeves and help set up an event. If that mix sounds energizing, keep reading. If it sounds chaotic, this is probably not the right fit.

What you will do

Membership (~60%) — the core of the job

• Own RANGE's membership program end-to-end: acquisition, retention, customer service, and stewardship.
• Set membership growth strategy in close partnership with the Publisher and Managing Editor.
• Own the audience funnel data: readership growth, free-subscriber conversion, paid-member conversion, churn, and lifetime value.

Marketing (~20%)

• Be the business voice of our marketing — design and execute campaigns that bring news audiences to RANGE products and convert them into supporters.
• Own social media strategy and oversee its execution.
• Do the marketing for our other revenue work — events, merch, sponsorships. Most of what these need is marketing: filling an event, moving merch, telling a sponsor's story well. You won't own those revenue lines alone — we all pitch in, and we are not asking you to be a solo ad-sales rep — but you're the person who makes them land.
• Show up for the community — be present at events, partner gatherings, and the civic spaces where RANGE's audience lives.

Project Management (~20%)

• Run business-side work — membership campaigns, merch, events, ad and sponsorship pushes — as concentrated team sprints, not infinite solo to-do lists. We work in sprints because solo ownership of everything is how things fall through the cracks.
• Manage up. Keep the Publisher and Managing Editor out of the weeds and on track. Push back when you need to. Surface team decisions early. Protect your own focus.
• Lead retros after each sprint — what worked, what didn't, what we should do differently. We are bad at this and we need someone who is not.

Who you are

We are looking for someone who is:

• Community-present and people-focused. You are comfortable in the room, at the event, on the panel — extroverted when needed. You can talk up the publication without the self-consciousness our editorial team sometimes carries. The work happens with people, not at a desk.
• Project-management-wired. You instinctively break work into milestones, dependencies, and deliverables. You enjoy that. You can bring structure to a creative team that has more ideas than capacity.
• Comfortable managing up. You can disagree with senior people, hold them to commitments, and keep your own focus from being constantly redirected. You will be working with a Publisher and Managing Editor who are high-energy and idea-rich; we need someone who is not going to drown in our weather.
• An analyst at heart. You are comfortable in a dashboard, but more importantly you can turn what you see into a hypothesis and a next move. You can read a conversion rate, find the story underneath it, and translate that story into a sprint with goals and milestones. You are at home in Ghost, Stripe, and a spreadsheet — but the real skill we need is your judgment about what the numbers mean.
• Mission-aligned. Our work is morally serious. The communities we cover are the point. If "growth" reads to you as a number divorced from the people behind it, you are going to be miserable here.
• At ease with imperfection. RANGE is six years old, profitable, and still very much a startup. Some of our processes are mature. Most are not. You will be helping us build them.

You do not need a journalism or business degree. You do not need to have come up through the media industry. You do need to love community, care about Spokane (or be excited to fall in love with it), and be ready to grow this work alongside us.

We strongly encourage applications from members of the communities our journalism centers — especially Black, Indigenous, and people of color; LGBTQIA2S+ people; people with disabilities; people from backgrounds of poverty; immigrants and former refugees; and people from outside traditional journalism pipelines.

Skills and experience

Must have

• 2+ years in marketing, membership, audience development, fundraising, community organizing, or a closely related field.
• Strong project- and time-management instincts — and the discipline to actually use them.
• Sharp written and verbal communication.
• Real analyst capability — you can read membership data, identify what is changing, and translate that into a concrete next move (not just observations).
• Ease in Google Workspace, basic spreadsheets, and at least one CRM/email/marketing platform. (We use and love Ghost. If you are trained in something else, that's okay.)
• A real interest in the people, neighborhoods, and institutions of the Inland Northwest — or a real eagerness to develop one fast.

Nice to have

• Experience in startup or early-stage culture.
• Experience in news, podcasting, or a mission-driven nonprofit.
• Familiarity with Ghost (our publishing platform), Stripe (our payments stack), or comparable tools.
• Experience designing events with revenue or community-building goals.
• Experience pricing products, services, or memberships.
• Experience with social ads, sponsored content, or e-commerce.
• Bilingual English and Spanish.

Culture-based competencies

• Leadership without ego — you can lead a project, take feedback in real time, change course, and not need to be told you were right.
• Equity-minded — you hold the question "who is this serving and who is this not serving?" close while you work.
• Quality over quantity — you would rather ship fewer things well than many things badly.
• Community first, cash second — you can grow revenue without compromising values.
• Tenacity and kindness — you go the distance to get something done, and you stay generous with your colleagues while you are doing it.
• Iterative — you love to try, measure, tweak, and try again.

Why RANGE

• Ownership. RANGE is a worker-owned cooperative. After a 90-day probationary period, you own a share of the publication and you have a vote in how it is run.
• Profit share. When the cooperative does well, you do well.
• Real benefits. Health, dental, and vision options; three weeks paid time off; team-wide paid summer and winter breaks; paid holidays; monthly transit and cell-phone reimbursements; paid family & medical leave.
• Flexibility. Flexible schedule, hybrid work, real autonomy. Work from home when you need to. Be in the office when it is better. Our team is usually in office about 3–4 days per week.
• Meaning. We're a newsroom that exists to serve the people traditional journalism has always left behind, made by a team that takes that mission seriously every day.
• Impact. You'll have a foundational role in a publication that has, in just six years, materially changed the journalism landscape of a region.
• A place you can thrive. Spokane is roughly 30% cheaper to live than the big West-Coast metros, with a serious civic and cultural life of its own. We offer a relocation stipend of up to $2,000 for candidates moving to Spokane.

Our hiring process

We are transparent about how this works because we want you to know what you are walking into.

1. 1
   Application Your résumé, two references, and answers to our three short-answer questions. No cover letter required. Portfolio or work sample optional.
2. 2
   Zoom screen (~30 minutes) For promising candidates, with members of our leadership team.
3. 3
   Finalist assignment Top 2–4 candidates. ~3–5 hours of work, with a $250 stipend. Designed to surface how you analyze and strategize.
4. 4
   Finalist interview (1 hour, in person if possible) With our Publisher, Managing Editor, and Ops Manager.
5. 5
   Conversation with the editorial team Culture-fit vibe check.
6. 6
   Offer and onboarding Target start date: July 2026.