YOUR ELi: Minutes versus Hours

East Lansing City Council meets every week, but half of these meetings are called “regular meetings” and half are called “work sessions.” Council “work sessions”—which have, all told, been constituting over half the time Council actually meets—are not videotaped or broadcast to the public, which  “regular meetings” are. This means that, unless you have the time and energy to go to City Hall for "work sessions," you can’t find out for yourself what’s going on at Council over half the time.

It’s true you can read the Council’s public agendas, their synopses, and their minutes. But let me give you an example from this week of what that gets you. This week, Council spent at its “work session” nearly an hour interactively discussing, with citizens and City staff, the possible closure of the Bailey childcare and Bailey Community Center.

How is that hour of intense discussion described in the published synopsis? “Council discussed the following:  . . . Early Age Childcare and Bailey Community Center Facility.”

That’s it.

Compare that to ELi’s report on what happened, available here. You can see why ELi's Managing Editor Ann Nichols and I feel like “minutes” are not enough to keep East Lansing’s people informed. If something like this issue is going to be reported in a way that lets people not at the meeting know what happened, it takes hours of reporting effort, not “minutes.”

Here’s one more recent example of why we feel it is critically important for us to give adequate time to important stories:

Remember the recent phone scam involving ELPD? We at ELi learned about that through a press release from the City. Another local news outlet decided just to run the news release, under their own reporter’s name. That outlet used a headline that said ELPD’s phone lines had been “hacked.”

We could see why, reading the press release, the other news outlet would assume that’s what happened; the press release said “that the ELPD non-emergency business number has been compromised.” Sounds like a hack of the phone lines.

But when we called ELPD’s Lt. Steve Gonzalez to get the details, he explained to us that the phone lines weren’t hacked; a scammer was using an internet trick to make it look like the calls were coming from ELPD when they weren’t. So that’s what we reported.

At ELi, we’re committed to being accurate rather than first, to go deeper rather than to be quicker. Sometimes that means you’ll hear the news about East Lansing first somewhere else. But we’re okay with that. Ann and I want to make sure that when you come to ELi, you can be confident that the stories you’re getting are more than “minutes,” and more than reprints of press releases. We aim to make sure that what you read here is worth your reading time.

We want to hear from you about how we’re doing. So please, be in touch. We enjoy getting your feedback, even—especially!—when you let us know we got something wrong. We rely on you, our readers, to join us in this venture of citizen news sharing.

Coming up this week in YOUR East Lansing:

Sunday: Spirituals, Prayer, and Protest Concert with Special Guests Take 6

Tuesday: Maker Studio Workshop, Keep Warm with Rice Bags

Tuesday: City Council, including decision on Bailey daycare and Community Center

Thursday: “Organized Labor’s Campaign against the Polygraph, 1965-1988”

Thursday: “Water Scarcity in the Middle East: Can Technology Be the Game Changer?”

Friday: Ten Pound Fiddle: Black Fathers of Folk Music

Saturday: Boy Scout Monster Merit Badge Blitz

Saturday: Maker Studio Workshop, Window Cling Craft

Make sure you don’t miss anything by signing up for ELi’s weekly news round-up, delivered to your email box once per week: sign up

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