YOUR ELi: New Reporters on the Team

This week we held a new reporters meeting at my house for folks interested in becoming reporters for ELi. We had six potential rookies attend! They ranged in age from ninth grade to people a ninth-grader would consider old. Best of all, their interests ranged all over the place, from arts and music, to city politics, to crime and public safety, to school district activities, to environment and garden.

The meeting forced me to organize our written materials for our reporters—so that was an added benefit. Being on the inside of ELi, it all seems kind of obvious to me and to our managing editor Ann Nichols. Basically it goes like this: You pitch us an ELi-appropriate idea, you produce a draft that sticks to our standards, we work with you and publish it!

Understandably, though, people want some more guidance than that. So we now have a list of Frequently Asked Questions about being an ELi reporter, a checklist for reporters, and a handout showing how to avoid editorializing in your prose. (ELi publishes only factual, non-partisan, non-editorial work about East Lansing.)

But really, it is pretty simple, as the more-than-fifty people who have been reporters for ELi can tell you! So give it a try. Contact us. We want your help bringing to the people of East Lansing hyperlocal news and information that we’re not getting anywhere else.

We want your help investigating answers to readers’ questions, reporting on local meetings and events, writing up profiles of interesting people and places in town, and providing historical context to the East Lansing we now inhabit.

Even if you can only provide one article per year, we want you on the team. Why? Because ELi is news of the people, by the people, and for the people—and to really achieve that mission, we need as many people involved as possible. Help us make ELi and East Lansing greater by joining in this community-centered public service.