Your ELi: Why Ask ELi?

When I was growing up, I loved when newspapers would take a question from a reader and find out the answer. Often these reader-submitted questions were ones I had, too, but sometimes they were a question many of us would never have thought to ask—a question that revealed an angle to a story that would have otherwise been missed by citizens.

It was the memory of these reader-focused columns—and also personal admiration of John Schneider’s long-time, reader-helping column in the Lansing State Journal—that led to setting up Ask Eli to Investigate, our weekly column answering reader questions. For Ask Eli, we take a question from a reader and assign a reporter to try to find out the answers. We then report to everyone what we found.

Ask ELi is in perfect keeping with our mission as a local nonprofit news service. We love doing it. When a question comes in, the reaction by our Managing Editor Ann Nichols and I is kind of like someone just gave us a nice strong pot of coffee. We become alert and focused. And so often the question tips us off on something to which we’ve been blind—something that leads to a bigger story.

Sometimes sources who help answer questions for Ask ELi say to us, “Just have your reader be in touch with me directly and I’ll handle their questions.” When a source offers that, we always let readers know that’s an option they can pursue if they want, but we also recognize that sometimes people are asking us to do an investigation because they fear negative repercussions from asking. We get that. As reporters for the community that reads ELi, we can ask tough questions, be nosy, and press for answers without feeling exposed like an individual might.

We seem to be meeting a need: We are now getting enough questions coming in that we have about three weeks’ worth stacked up in the queue. The consequence of this is that sometimes we now use a reader’s question to build a news story rather than the using it for a designated weekly column. (In that case, we let the reader know the answer is coming in a news story.) We are happy to be so busy! We hope readers will keep sending in lots of questions.

If you have a question you’d like us to investigate, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Know that if you have a question, chances are so does someone else. So ignore any voice in your head that says, “It’s too self-centered of me to ask this narrow question.”
• Understand that while we may write back to you to ask for clarification, we won’t print your name but will only identify you as “a reader.” You are welcome, of course, to tell people you asked the question, but we keep our questioners anonymous so that everyone will always feel safe when they send us questions.
• Remember you can ask us to investigate anything in East Lansing. We’ve tackled questions about shopping, about why your neighbors are voting one way or another on a ballot question, whether what we’re hearing about a developer is true, and lots of questions about ice and snow removal.
• You can be a reporter for us. This means that if you have a question you yourself would like to investigate, we can help you figure out how to do that and you can report it for your neighbors. (We would print this as a news story rather than as “Ask ELi.”) You can also become an “Ask ELi” investigator for us; in that case Ann will work with you to find stories you are interested in working on. You decide whether you’d like to contribute the service at no cost or be paid. (Our reporters are about evenly split on contributions and paid service.)

Before I close, I’d just like to note how tremendously helpful many City staff members have been in answering questions for our readers, particularly Tim McCaffrey (Director of Parks, Recreation, and Arts) and Marie Wicks (City Clerk). Their sense of public service has often made our public service possible.