When Do We Hold Back on Bringing You News?

What a week of news! If you’re a regular reader or subscribe to our free weekly newsletter, you know that, this week, ELi reported on new surprises related to the eBay land sale, a controversial attempt to restrict rentals in Shaw Estates, an iconic East Lansing business moving to Lansing, the loss of a beloved baseball coach, the Mayor and DDA Chair voting against an extension for the Royal Vlahakis deal, and on criticisms of an emerging plan for a review board for complaints made by citizens against East Lansing police and fire personnel.

What you haven’t seen is a number of other big reports we are working on. As ELi’s Publisher, I’m holding back on some of those.

Why would we ever hold back on bringing you the news?

We take very seriously our role as a community-based public service organization.

Reports you see at ELi are often the result of many rounds of discussions, investigating, drafting, and editing by ELi personnel. A good example is this report on talks over court consolidation. Besides the three of us listed on the byline, that report also involved discussions with additional members of the government reporting team and editors.

Sometimes we have to figure out what does or doesn’t belong in a story, or we need to create a special graphic to clearly explain an issue, or we need to pass it by one more ELi team member to ask for a “tone check” – a review that specifically looks for bias in our reporting. That happened with this week’s story on the rental overlay petition.

We want to make sure we are meeting our mission of being your community-centered, nonpartisan, reliable local news organization. We have a general rule that every ELi story goes through at least two sets of eyes, but many go through more than that. And that takes time.

At ELi, our motto is “getting it right is more important than publishing it fast.” We believe you can see that in our published work.

We pride ourselves on being complete and accurate.

Sometimes when we’re bringing you news, there’s some key piece of information we can’t figure out, or a key player we haven’t reached. Sometimes things said by one official in public don’t match what another has said. Sometimes we determine that simply reporting what’s in an ELPD press release will lead to more reader questions than a feeling of having real answers.

In such circumstances, if there is no true emergency, we work hard to try to sort out what’s really going on before we bring you the news. We do that, for example, when there’s a rash of shootings and we want to be able to explain what’s going on.

This is why you will often see our reports come out later than the City PR’s office new weekly summary of City Council activities, and sometimes later than other news organizations’ reporting. What we bring you is a lot more than a government-issued synopsis or a superficial pass.

At ELi, we don’t want to waste your time when you’re taking the time to be informed.

We don’t want to overload you.

A lot of media experts seem to think the goal of every news organization should be to publish lots and lots of reports, because doing so “increases engagement.” Hmm. We know that what that kind of behavior does accomplish is driving up the kinds of statistics that advertisers like to see.

ELi is nonprofit, community-supported, and doesn’t take advertising. Our mission isn’t to impress advertisers; it’s to inform the community.

We learned a long time ago that we needed to avoid publishing tons of content, lest our readers feel overwhelmed and miss what they might want to see. As a consequence, sometimes we hold back on a big report so that we’re not pushing two or three at you in a single day.

This week, for example, even though we were busy tracking development activities, we decided to wait on specifically reporting that the Royal Vlahakis deal was coming back to the DDA until after it happened and we knew the outcome.

We want you to feel like you can manage staying informed about East Lansing. You can’t go to tons of meetings, lots of games, and check all the calendars around town to see what might be of interest. We try to do that for you and bring you a digestible quantity of quality reporting.

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