Finger about to point at city

Tired of mainstream media and popular culture, eight young adults are ready to give Spokane a hand with The Finger.

The Finger is the latest free, alternative newspaper to hit Spokane, and staffers hope it’ll find its niche with readers of alternative publications. The first issue comes out Tuesday with 12 pages, including a main story on homeless camping, a personality profile of local muralist Dean Ray, book reviews and even horoscopes.

The 3,500 copies of their first issue will be distributed in downtown Spokane, the North Side and Spokane Valley, at places such as The Satellite Diner, 425 W. Sprague Ave., and Piece of Mind North, 4103 N. Division St. They plan to publish every other week.

“We just hope to affect people maybe in a little way and challenge their way of thinking,” staff writer Lindsay Williams, 21, said. “To be an informed individual, you have to be aware of other ideologies and what others have to say.”

To offer a different take on local issues and events, they plan to cover stories mainstream media ignore, and approach stories from different angles. The story about homeless camping, for example, details their first-hand experience camping with the homeless one night. They also plan to highlight talented local artists and singers who they believe don’t receive the attention they deserve.

“There are some people who don’t have a voice who deserve one,” art director Ryan Sicilia, 28, said.

The staffers insist they’re not doing this for the money, not that there’s any money to go around. Costs for publishing the first issue ran about $400, though they’ve raised about $600 through bake sales and advertising. Opinion editor Myra St. Clair, 30, even sold her couch for $40 at a yard sale to fund the paper. Most staffers work at places like Albertson’s, Hot Topic, and St. Clair is working to open her own independent bookstore.

The newsroom is in the basement of a house that co-editor-in-chief Steve Peterson, 22, owns and shares with co-editor-in-chief Seth Vincent, 20, and two other roommates. A turquoise iMac sits on a table littered with a Che Guevara coffee mug, unopened bags of Ramen noodles and empty beer cans.

In fact, the staffers credit Pabst Blue Ribbon beer for the creation of their newspaper in early June.

“We were trashed one night and decided to do a paper,” Peterson said.

They called up friends that night in a state of inebriated brainstorming and recruited them for the paper. Weekly planning meetings soon followed, with production kicking into high gear the past two weeks.

“We’re just crazy enough to do it,” Vincent said.

The staffers, all in their 20s or early 30s, are an eclectic gang of counterculture rebels and self-identified conservatives. Six met while working on the newspaper at Spokane Falls Community College. They met the other two staffers, volunteers with a vegan organization, while working on their homeless camping story.

The attention-grabbing name of the paper arrived out of a rather innocuous work session between Vincent and Sicilia. Vincent’s middle finger was infected, and Sicilia suggested naming the paper The Finger. The name stuck.

Staffers shy away from categorizing the paper as liberal or conservative, calling it instead a community forum. But they don’t hide their disdain for big media and fast food conglomerates in their opinion pages. The paper consciously courts independently owned small businesses as their advertising base.

Is it hypocritical then that Sicilia works for McDonald’s?

“My issue isn’t with individual employees or managers, it’s with the corporate system that oppresses them,” he said.

They expect people to dismiss their paper in the beginning, though they hope to resonate with their target audience, especially with the July death of The Local Planet, another alternative paper.

Staffers said they hope the newspaper will continue coming out every other week even after classes at SFCC start in September. Even if the time or money can’t be found, they said, they still plan to publish an online version of the paper at fingerspokane.com.

“With the people we have, there’s no way this won’t keep going one way or the other,” Peterson said.