We Like to Dig.
Where we've been, and where we're going.
In this final entry in the introductory series launching The Western Edge, we wanted to lay out some of the work Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas have done over the past decade as a sampler of our ethos in this work and what’s to come. Next week, we’ll be delivering our first story, which we’re incredibly excited to put before you because writing about ourselves is about as dreadful as it gets.
Separately and together, we have a long track record of producing deep-dive investigative journalism rooted in western United States. This type of work gets us up in the morning, and The Western Edge is the next chapter of our collaboration.
We have an ask: If you have listened to one of these projects above and enjoyed it, consider supporting The Western Edge with a paid subscription. Investigative journalism takes time and money to produce. Gathering tape, getting public records and tracking down people who don’t want to be found — the work that goes beyond reading a press release and scrolling social media — is becoming a lost art in journalism. Help us preserve it!
Our collaboration began with the podcast Bundyville. The first season of the longform story series, published by Longreads in 2018, was adapted into a podcast with the support of Oregon Public Broadcasting. The project examined the deeper story behind the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the winter of 2016. While the 41-day affair drew the interest of local, national and international media, there was much more to it than what reporters initially captured. Bundyville is a document of the religious motivations that inspired the Bundy family to lead standoffs with the government in both Oregon and Nevada, and where God was telling them to go next. This series was a finalist for the American Society of Magazine Editors’ prestigious National Magazine Award for Best Podcast, and The Ringer deemed it “The Podcast that Explains Trump’s America.”
But the story was so much bigger than we could have imagined. Some reporters might have called it good and moved on then. But we like to dig. In 2019, we continued reporting on the Patriot movement, and how its tendrils reached across the West. The second season of Bundyville, called The Remnant, examines the ripple effects of the Bundys’ occupations, and the people they inspired. There’s a bombing in a small Nevada desert town, a would-be bomber in Utah, Christian nationalist lawmakers in Eastern Washington and a separatist community near the Canadian border. The project was again recognized by ASME in 2020.
From there, Haas went on to produce a series for Sony and OPB called Dying for a Fight. Many who attended political protests in Portland, Oregon, between 2015 and 2019 had seen 23-year-old Sean Kealiher. The prominent anti-fascist made fiery speeches and had no qualms about going nose-to-nose with police, as well as the long line of far-right groups who’d chosen to pick fights in his hometown. When someone killed Kealiher in 2019, questions remained over what actually happened and what Portland police really knew. Dying for a Fight viewed Kealiher’s life through the lens of his grieving mother, and told the story of his political worldview. The project led Haas, reporters Sergio Olmos and Jonathan Levinson, producer Grant Irving and a small team of collaborators showed what happened out of frame of viral Twitter videos and pressed police for answers. Eventually, they solved who killed Kealiher.
Meanwhile, Sottile collaborated with BBC producer Georgia Catt on two podcasts. Two Minutes Past Nine, released in 2020, was a 25-year retrospective on the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, which killed 168 civilians. The series sought to understand how extremist ideas inspired Timothy McVeigh to commit the bombing, and how those ideas had become progressively more mainstream in American politics. In 2023, Sottile and Catt teamed up again for Burn Wild, an investigation of the Earth Liberation Front. Often branded as environmental extremists, Sottile and Catt become curious if that label holds up when the world is literally burning. Sottile also authored two books documenting American extremism: When the Moon Turns to Blood and Blazing Eye Sees All.
We reunited as a reporting duo in 2024 on a story we started scratching at five years before: the wrongful incarceration and death row conviction of Jesse Lee Johnson. That story eventually became the first season of Hush, an ambitious project to investigate overlooked stories in the Northwest’s news deserts. Johnson, a Black man from Arkansas, had come to Oregon in the 1990s on a whim to see the ocean. A chance encounter in the state’s capital city, Salem, would find him targeted by biased police detectives, immovable prosecutors and a justice system bent on killing him. Our reporting helped free Johnson and set the record straight on his quarter century behind bars.
Season two of Hush investigated the 2019 death of Sarah Zuber in rural Columbia County, Oregon. Zuber had died just 400 feet from her family’s front door, but no one had a clue years later what actually happened to her. That confusion, as we’d find through thousands of hours of reporting, was due to unexplainable errors by the medical examiner, infighting among local law enforcement and waves of political subterfuge roiling the county. The result was a family who felt bruised and abandoned by what they had previously believed to be a close-knit, idyllic slice of Oregon.
Recently, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard made an entire podcast episode about our approach to journalism, how we keep ethics front and center at all times in our work, and how that helps us navigate difficult storytelling.
The Western Edge emerged out of the demise of Hush. We believe to best tell the story of the West, journalists need to spend time in its hidden corners, talking to people most affected by the powers that shape our region.
We are a small team, but we don’t mind getting into the muck. Digging is what we do. We know how to ask the right questions and how to tell a damn good story. The Western Edge aims to be the type of journalism our region needs - work that’s rooted here and isn’t chasing clicks on Facebook.
When you see us in your inbox, it will be worth your time.