Samantha Wohlfeil is the Inlander's News Editor, a role she moved into in April 2024 after working at the paper as a news writer since 2017. She oversees the paper's news section and leads annual special sections, from our Sustainability Issue to our philanthropy issue known as Give Guide. As time allows, she writes about the environment, health-related issues, rural communities, criminal justice and more.
She grew up in Moscow/Pullman and graduated from Western Washington University, where she majored in both journalism and Spanish and helped lead the student newspaper, The Western Front, in various roles, including as the Editor-in-Chief. She then worked at The Bellingham Herald, where her reporting on oil trains (in collaboration with a colleague in Washington, D.C.) helped uncover a manufacturing flaw that was causing train cars to leak crude oil across the country. That work resulted in a federal emergency order to replace the faulty valves. In 2022, she taught a journalism course at Eastern Washington University to the school's last cohort of journalism majors, and wrote a freelanced series on plastics for InvestigateWest.
Her award-winning work at the Inlander has included stories on a doomsday vault-like seedbank at Washington State University, the two-year journey to get one family out of Afghanistan after the U.S. pulled its troops in 2021, lynx reintroduction work by the Colville Confederated Tribes, how deadly the days after being released from prison can be, and more.
