YOUR ELI: Asking Again

Next month—which is actually the day after tomorrow—Eli is going to ask you for money again.

I’m imagining your mental responses: “You just asked us for money!” “Why don’t you just run ads like other news sites?” “Why do you people need all that money to run a website?”

First off, let me say as bluntly as possible that I hate asking for money from anyone, ever. If we didn’t have to ask, we wouldn’t ask, and as we grow, we are starting to look at other sources of financial support to supplement reader donations. But we can’t go for those grants until we have something to show the potential grantors, and that includes showing a healthy donor-reader base. The truth is, unless we give up our non-profit status and accept advertising, we’ll always need your help.

Why don’t we just do that—turn commercial? If you think about the common (and legitimate) complaints about the mainstream media, the most frequent issue is bias. It’s hard to know what you can trust when your news sources are in the position of weighing certain stories and truths against the possibility that advertisers will be offended and withdraw their business.

There are certainly honorable news sources locally and nationally that run ads, but the minute we were to make that change we couldn’t focus entirely on telling you what we see, what our reporters see, and what East Lansing citizens want to know. Eli would be more financially stable with commercial advertiser support, but it would never be what it is right now – unbiased, balanced and welcoming to corrections and requests for deeper and broader coverage. Your donations allow us to hold that course.

As far as why we need money, I’ll give you three of many reasons:

1. Although Eli’s Publisher Alice Dreger labors for hours each week for free for ELi (including doing all our accounting and attending City Council meetings most weeks and writing a thorough report before going to bed, often at one o’clock in the morning), I get paid to work as Eli’s Managing Editor. I am paid about 20% of what I’d be paid by a for-profit news organization, and often I work enough hours in a week that my hourly wage would average out to be less than minimum wage.

For that money, I write articles, edit almost everything you see on Eli, hunt for new writers, work with our writers to make sure deadlines are met, deal with arranging photos, work with Alice on fundraising and donor relations, and plan out and manage each month’s features. (There’s more, but thinking about it means I’d need a nap.) I do it because I believe in embedded citizen journalism, I love East Lansing, and I’m mad curious about where Eli can go and what we can do.

2.  We pay many of our writers. We pay them because we value their work, and because the best way to attract and retain good reporters is to reward them for their efforts. When an MSU student reporter takes time from her full class load and her part-time job to find story ideas and sources, conduct interviews, write and submit an article and go through the editing process, we can pay her because of your donations. When a reporter busy with a full-time job and family obligations takes the time to interview a City Council candidate and write a profile, we can pay her because of your donations.

3. Keeping a website running smoothly costs money. We have tech ninjas ready to fix glitches, add features and keep us up and running so that (so far) Eli has never gone down. We can pay them because of your donations.

So we’ll be asking. And if you value what we do, if you’ve come to rely on our unique coverage of all things East Lansing, you’ll answer with a donation.

(And by the way, you could just do it right now, here.)