Your ELi: Slow Motion Action

Above: update of our spring fundraising campaign

First, a quick update on our spring fundraising campaign. As you can see from the graph above, we are just about $2500 short of reaching our end-of-March goal of $8000. If we meet that goal, ELi will be funded through the end of June and so we can focus our attention on bringing you critical reporting of the May 5 election (involving two possible charter amendments), progress on developments in town, and the information you need to make your life in East Lansing more informed, more connected, and hopefully better.

We are so grateful to all of the people who have donated so far to this campaign! Residents and friends of East Lansing have donated as little as $20 and as much as $1000 to help us reach our goal. If you haven’t donated yet, or if you’d like to donate more, remember there are two easy ways to donate: use a credit or debit card by clicking here; or write a check payable to “East Lansing Info” and mail it to PO Box 115, East Lansing, MI 48826.

Your donation is tax deductible and all donations go back into the local economy. Not sure why we need money? Watch our video to learn more about why ELi requires financial support to function.

Now on to this week’s Your ELi observation:

If you’re a regular reader of ELi, you know that we use a “second set of eyes” editing standard on all articles; except for what amount to emergency (time is of the essence) posts, we make sure every article—including those written by me or our Managing Editor Ann Nichols—goes through an editor to check it against our standards of clarity, non-editorializing, non-partisanship, and accuracy.

In practice, because I typically serve as ELi’s reporter for City Council’s weekly Tuesday night meetings, this means that Ann is usually the editor for Council Capsule, our weekly Wednesday feature.

Ann commented to me this week, after reading my draft of Council Capsule, that odds are a lot of our readers skip reading Council Capsule. That’s because it almost always has the same rather unexciting image heading it (a photo of Council deep in deliberations), and the premise sounds boring, even to me. But, as Ann noted to me this week, it is often where you get the most remarkable news about what’s going on at the top governmental level of our city.

And what we do in Council Capsule is so in keeping with ELi’s mission of providing useful information to the people of East Lansing. There are reporters from other news sources at Council many weeks. But they decide which items that come before Council you will hear about. Usually, they tell you about one or two items. We don’t. We report to you a Capsule of everything Council talks about during a given week, right down to street closures for block parties.

Why? Because we believe that in order for us to help you really get a handle on your City government, you need steady, consistent, long-term reporting that is as complete as possible. You need us to look deeper into claims made, to help explain seemingly inexplicable positions, to show you what you might otherwise be missing.

Capsule is a critical part of that, as having an ELi reporter attend and report on Council every week means that we can keep an eye on stories as they develop slow-motion before our eyes—stories like the PDIG development, the land sale charter amendment proposal, the future of the Bailey Community Center, and the businesses that occupy our downtown.

Because folks know I don’t get paid a dime for my work for ELi (I am, in fact, a major financial donor to ELi), they sometimes ask me if I’ll continue doing Council Capsule even if ELi doesn’t survive financially. The simple answer is no. If ELi ends, so will this kind of reporting on Council.

Why, if I do it for free? The fact is that ELi provides a critical home for Council Capsule—a place where Capsule can be contextualized, expanded out from when necessary, and made available in a fashion that seems maximally useful to the citizens of East Lansing.

Moreover, ELi provides me hope that we can build enough of a citizen-reporting structure that I won’t have to be the near-sole weekly reporter for Council Capsule forever! If we can grow and sustain ELi, then Ann and I can train student reporters to become government reporters (as she has been training a wonderful group to become community reporters), and I will not have to be the sole person on whom others have to rely for this. And that’s important because the best, most unbiased reporting can be done when we spread the work around to more and more sets of eyes.

There is so much more we’ll be able to do for you through ELi if ELi survives and reaches the point of being able to successfully obtain grants to expand its reporting.

So if you think Council Capsule is boring, consider taking a closer look. And if you want that and the rest of ELi’s reporting to keep coming to you, then join me in financially supporting ELi to make that possible. We think we can make this thing work, and provide a national model for cities like ours of how to provide embedded-citizen, fact-focused, high-quality, local journalism in the age of the Internet. Consider being a part of that history.