News from your neighborhood in Your Voice

Welcome to Your Voice, a new community weekly newspaper for the Post Falls, Rathdrum and Spirit Lake areas available to subscribers of Idaho editions of The Spokesman-Review and free of charge on news racks throughout the region.

Each Thursday, we’ll bring you news from your neighborhood – “good” news about issues in your community and the people who are making positive changes at home, in the schools and at City Hall.

We’ll also bring you in print and on the Web the best in local citizen journalism – news stories written by you, our readers, who as citizen journalists know better than anyone else the issues affecting your neighborhoods. Letting readers become reporters is a new concept in community journalism, one that gives members of the community ownership of their neighborhood newspaper. More about that in a minute.

For our part, the Your Voice staff of reporters, correspondents and photographers will bring you stories each week about how communities are managing the changes brought on by the rapid development of the Rathdrum Prairie and its effect on residents’ quality of life and taxpayers’ pocketbooks.

Learn about the businesses – new and old – that are serving the community in our Business Focus columns. Read about Good Neighbors – the dependable and helpful folks who are true bulwarks of the community – and discover the stories behind how couples met, fell in love and keep their relationships strong in our Love Stories feature.

In Your Voice, you’ll see Tributes to deceased members of the community and how they affected the lives of loved ones, friends and strangers in both large ways and small. Read Cool Kids to discover the many children who have interesting hobbies and pursuits, find out who is on the high school, middle school and elementary school honor rolls, and learn about what’s going on by reading reporter Meghann Cuniff’s Inside Our Schools column.

Barbara Gerry examines issues affecting senior citizens in her Boomers and Beyond column, neighbors express their opinions in Prairie Voices person-on-the-street interviews and Vocal Point op-ed pieces, and local athletes are profiled on our prep sports pages.

From public meetings to the Feature Creature, from health news to a community events calendar and correspondent Mary Jane Honegger’s Rathdrum Prairie News, we aim to offer a snapshot of the community that is accurate in content and balanced in presentation. As always, accuracy is our top goal – if you see a mistake, contact us and we’ll correct it.

If you have a calendar event, team photo, public meeting or important announcement you want to publish, follow the steps listed in the “how to” box accompanying this story to get it into print and on the Your Voice Web site. If you have an idea for a story, contact us and we’ll report it. Or you can report it yourself in the Citizen Journal component of Your Voice that allows readers to become reporters who write about the news their neighbors need to know.

Citizen Journal is a forum in which Voice readers can publish their own feature stories and neighborhood news items and photographs. We hope to eventually expand this forum to the Internet to allow Voice readers to publish neighborhood news directly on The Spokesman-Review’s Voices Web sites. The idea is to report neighborhood news on the neighborhood level. Do you have a story to tell or neighborhood news to report? E-mail your submissions to idahovoice@spokesman.com. Please try to limit submissions to 500 words or less. Be sure to include your name, phone number and e-mail address so we can verify authenticity. Depending on news value, items will appear in print, on the Web or both.

The Post Falls-Rathdrum edition of Your Voice is the latest addition to The Spokesman-Review’s Voices family and continues the paper’s strong tradition of community journalism.

Subscribers in Kootenai County already receive the Handle Extra, the community news weekly found in most Saturday editions of The Spokesman-Review’s Idaho editions. Your Voice subscribers in the Post Falls, Rathdrum and Spirit Lake areas will continue to receive the Handle Extra. The paper also publishes Voices for North and South Side Spokane neighborhoods and twice weekly for Spokane Valley neighborhoods.

We’re excited to launch the Post Falls-Rathdrum edition of Your Voice and welcome reader participation in its growth and content. With the help of citizen journalists, we are looking forward to publishing a newspaper as dynamic and vibrant as the communities it serves. It’s Your Voice, where readers are writers, too, and where neighborhood news is king.