My mom is kind of a big deal
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
There’s not enough room on this page — maybe even in this paper — to adequately praise or even describe my mom. She’s kind of …
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
There’s not enough room on this page — maybe even in this paper — to adequately praise or even describe my mom. She’s kind of …
By Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey
Reader Staff
It is a spring evening, nearing sunset, after a warm day. The smell of sun-baked lakebed and blooming skunk cabbage fills the car, carried by …
By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
Every job has its stresses, no matter if you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the dishwasher in a small-town diner.
Journalism is …
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
It’s common for people to point to “that one teacher” who made a big impact on them when they were young. I’ve been lucky to …
By Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey
Reader Staff
On a Wednesday evening, walking away from the office after sending another issue of the Reader, my heart pounds.
Despite nearly five years of …
By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
It’s official: traveling is back. Though the number of people passing through TSA checkpoints hasn’t quite reached pre-pandemic levels, the seven-day average is the highest …
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
Two years ago on this day I was out of a job — and, for the first time in my job-hopping life, it was involuntary. …
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
For the past couple of days, since our big cold snap, Reader Publisher Ben Olson and I have been sitting in the newsroom with two …
By Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey
Reader Staff
I have long pointed to my relative youth as a main pillar of my identity.
My residency in a retirement town and Boomer-dominated county has …
By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
Usually when Valentine’s Day draws near, we take time to show our significant others how much they mean to us. This year, though, I can’t …
The Sandpoint Reader is our town's local, independent weekly newspaper. "Independent" means that the Reader is locally owned, in a partnership between Publisher Ben Olson and Keokee Co. Publishing, the media company owned by Chris Bessler that also publishes Sandpoint Magazine and Sandpoint Online. Sandpoint Reader LLC is a completely independent business unit; no big newspaper group or corporate conglomerate or billionaire owner dictates our editorial policy. And we want the news, opinion and lifestyle stories we report to be freely available to all interested readers - so unlike many other newspapers and media websites, we have NO PAYWALL on our website. The Reader relies wholly on the support of our valued advertisers, as well as readers who voluntarily contribute. Want to ensure that local, independent journalism survives in our town? You can help support the Reader for as little as $1.