ELi Sustainability Campaign Continues

Ann Nichols, ELi’s Managing Editor, and I talked this morning about the need to share what’s going on with us at ELi. Most people see only the fairly polished end-product of ELi—the news we publish, our calendar, our news alerts on social media, and our weekly newsletter. You don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. To be frank, the last two weeks have been pretty brutal.

This is not a big town, and MSU is an integral part of it. A number of our team members are personally impacted by what’s going on with MSU and the news surrounding Larry Nassar’s sentencing. I don’t want to invade the privacy of people who work with us, so let me just suggest that, to say our team is not at normal functioning psychologically would be to put it mildly.

ELi has become important enough to this community that people are now constantly asking us to cover various things. You should see this weekend’s mail alone, with a lot less of it focused on Nassar and MSU than you might expect. (People get that there are a lot of news organizations focusing on those stories.) But the “asks” are well out-stripping the financial support.

In the last two weeks, Ann and I have been on the phone with what I would call “mission discussions” every day for substantial amounts of time. This is not normal. Usually we have one mission discussion per week, on Tuesday afternoons. This is happening because we have way too few resources for what we’re being asked by our readership to do. In some ways, that's a sign of ELi being a well-established, highly-trusted nonprofit news organization. People expect us to be here to help. 

But we do need funds to operate, so, in this midst of all this, we are trying to fundraise towards our Sustainability Campaign goal of January 31 (two days from now). While I said on January 9 that I’d stop reporting and work on nothing but fundraising, I meant it. But that simply hasn’t been possible.

The first story to break that resolve was the story of ELHS freshman Alex Hosey’s request to the Mayor to have East Lansing reckon with its history of racism. I had to report that because ELi’s two other government reporters, Chris Root and Jessy Gregg, were actively working on other significant stories for you, including about the ongoing budget-slashing talks.

Even if the massive fallout from Nassar’s sentencing hearings had not happened during this period, it would have been hard for us to keep up. We’ve got the City’s financial problems, new tax proposals, the retaining wall (False Claims Act) lawsuit fallout, significant neighborhood-specific actions, major doings at School Board, and more.

Check out our front page if you have no clue what I’m talking about. Things are busy around here.

Bottom line: The current flood of important news in East Lansing is making it really hard for us to provide adequate service while adequately fundraising. We have about $5,000 in match funds that could go untapped if more people don’t step up soon to help us with fundraising by donating or asking people to donate.

We now have $6,000 in match funds from core donors to encourage new donors. We have raised $1,286 towards that match fund, so there’s $4,714 left looking for new donors.

Right now, our total commitment from donors is a $58,128 for 2018. That’s inadequate to the level of service we are currently providing, which will cost at least $80,000 this year. Besides increases in costs and news production levels, we are facing the need for a major software upgrade for reasons of security and stability.

We know (and are grateful) that other journalism organizations will continue to be here to cover Nassar and MSU. We also know they won’t be here to cover what ELi’s team covers most of the time.

If you care about the service we bring, now’s the time to help. You can plagiarize this letter to potential new donors. You can nudge people on social media. And you can donate.

Thank you!