Ask Eli: What Has Surprised Us So Far?

East Lansing Info (ELi) is now about eighteen months into its life as an IRS-recognized nonprofit public service organization. Because we are thriving, I’m getting more and more questions about ELi both locally and from people in other cities. Today I’m going to answer a question from someone in a small central Ohio city who looked at ELi and asked me:

What has surprised you as ELi’s publisher?

Based on the rest of the message, I can tell that by this, the visitor to our site meant, “What has happened in the last eighteen months that you didn’t expect?”

Here is some of what has surprised me.

Running a small business is much more complicated than I realized. I have helped run a small national nonprofit organization before, and I have functioned as an administrator on many projects, including some with complicated funding issues. But I never expected there would be so many forms that we would have to produce so often, and I never expected that I would require so much expert help to figure out how to fill out those forms. I honestly do not understand how people with less education and fewer resources than I am fortunate to have manage to operate small businesses in compliance with all the regulations.

That said, another thing that has surprised me is how happy I feel on payday when I write and deliver the checks to our paid contributors. Taking donations and channeling them directly back into the community makes me feel like I do when the daffodils bloom in spring.

Explaining ELi’s model has been challenging. Many people have a hard time wrapping their heads around a news service being a public service organization (even while they contribute to NPR or PBS). To me, this model makes perfect sense: one of the most important elements of democratic community life is the press. People can’t connect with their community and make educated decisions that reflect their values if they don’t know what’s going on around them. So it seems obvious to me that if there is no longer a commercial economy that can support local news for a small city, people in that city might have to do that work as a public service, as a way to support their community.

But even though we make very clear we are a public news service, a lot of people think that ELi should take ads, like traditional newspapers, and pay for itself that way, or else that everyone involved should work for free (like I do). The truth is that traditional newspapers are dying in the ad-based and subscription-based economic model—that’s why ELi has had to come into existence!

As for whether everyone should work for free for ELi, I know from a previous (pre-incorporation) version of ELi that the truth is that you have to pay people to keep them feeling professional, valued, and “on call,” even if what you pay them is way less than their work deserves. Our offering payment also cements what we are saying about contributors having to meet our standards—payment says “this is serious work.”

All successful nonprofits pay staff. We don’t pay anyone very much—we operate on only about $36,000/year right now—but we do sustain energy by paying the contributors who want to be paid, when they meet our standards for accuracy, nonpartisanship, and clarity.

People who love ELi’s service often think it is up to someone else to support that service. Thanks to the Internet, people are now used to the idea that news should be provided free of charge, even while they believe that no one does any good work for free. So, even though our readers are generally not surprised to hear that many of our reporters elect to get paid for their contributions, they still think they should not have to contribute donations to support that reporting. I’m always surprised how few opt to pitch in even $10 a year, even while they tell me they can no longer imagine life without ELi.

That said, we have a group of donors (including automatic-monthly donors) who are so generous, and that generosity sometimes takes me by surprise, even though my husband and I also donate a lot to ELi. I guess I should not be surprised that other people feel the same dedication to this community that we do.

There is a “there” here. One criticism I have often heard (and felt) about East Lansing is that “there’s no there there.” But ELi has convinced me that’s not true, as ELi has brought me so much knowledge about my own city. I’ve learned about the deep history of our City’s topography and river, about the history of housing discrimination in East Lansing, about businesses, entertainment forms, and services I didn’t know exist, and so much more. It’s surprising to me how a largely-textual news site can create a sense of place in your mind. I love waking up and reading what Managing Editor Ann Nichols has brought! I’m perpetually surprised at what I didn’t know about the place I’ve lived for twenty years.

You can’t predict who will help you or what will happen. When we launched ELi, I had lots of predictions about who would be our reporters, who on City staff would help us, who would donate. A lot of those predictions were wrong, and the unpredictability of that plus the unpredictability of what will happen in our city from day to day has made ELi a wilder ride than I expected.

We have weeks that are just insane, like last week, and then quieter weeks, like this one. Last month alone, we had eighteen different reporters plus major contributions of important information from three City staff members! I would not have guessed January in the north would look like that—but I’m learning to no longer be surprised by the waves and by strange local developments.

Local is global. I’ve been surprised by how similar our experiences at ELi have been to news sources that are much bigger than ours. We struggle with the same issues—objectivity, accuracy, how to convey complex stories, how to bring “bad” news without people getting mad at us, how to get enough resources for the stories that need covering. I guess I expected that as a small-city nonprofit, we would have different concerns, issues, and struggles, but no—journalism is journalism the world over.

This came home to me when I recently read that classic in American journalism, All the President’s Men. I was, honestly, amused to realize how similar our experiences of wrestling with news were at ELi, if on a smaller scale. When our Managing Editor Ann Nichols gave me as a holiday gift a reprint of an image of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee, I laughed aloud and understood the joke. (I think at ELi we are now up to three “Deep Throat”s.)

So much work, so much reward. ELi has turned out to cost me upwards of 30 hours a week of work, which has put a dent in my paid professional work as an historian, writer, and speaker, but it has also been way more rewarding than I ever imagined it could be. I feel vividly grateful for the experiences, the relationships, and the lessons ELi has brought.