Your ELi: Growing Pains

ELi is experiencing growing pains.

Growing is a good thing for us. Pain is (from pretty much anybody’s point of view) a bad thing, unless one wants to get all cosmic about becoming better people, or building muscles, or some other lofty goal irrelevant to this message.

The pain, at the moment, comes from having far more story ideas and opportunities than we have writers to bring them to life. Both our Publisher Alice Dreger and I keep a list of stories we’d like to see on ELi. I won’t tell you what they are, but I can promise you that you would find at least one or two things on those lists that would make you say, “that would be so interesting!” Or, “I always wondered about that.”

Why, you may ask, don’t we just write them ourselves? We try, but we’re kind of overwhelmed. Suffice it to say that if we spent the time necessary to build some of the large-scale stories or series we have in mind, there would be no content on ELi for weeks, because I wouldn’t be working on finding writers, writing, or editing, and Alice wouldn’t be running the books for ELi, finding stories, covering City Council, or doing the kind of research at which she excels.

Why don’t our existing writers write them? They just can’t write them all. Right now, every single one of our regular writers is working on at least one story for ELi in addition to their “day jobs,” which vary from being an ELHS student, to being a stay-at-home dad and musician, to being an MSU student, to working on environmental grants, to teaching at MSU, to serving as Dean of the College of Human Medicine at MSU, and to developing low-cost housing for disabled veterans. Many are parents of young children or children of elderly parents, all are people who tend to say “yes” and jump in when asked for help. Their plates, hands, and calendars are already fairly full.

This week, both a prominent evolutionary biologist and a retired staff astronomer at Abrams Planetarium are contributing to ELi, pretty much of their own accord. Last week we paired up a sports-loving MSU undergrad writer with an ELHS Men’s Soccer Team that wasn’t getting any press, and that started what will be a season of coverage. We also added a reporter embedded at the High School to report from a perspective we can’t duplicate. We live for this stuff.

Which brings me to you. We need you to write, too. You don’t have to be a great writer to write for ELi; we’ll help you every step of the way. We’ll pay you for your work if you wish to be paid. We need you for your passion about astronomy, sports, local schools, solving mysteries, elections, East Lansing history, music or any of the other things going on in East Lansing. We need you because you have knowledge and connections and stories we can’t even imagine.

We need you because sharing what you see and what you know is part of building community. And building community is what ELi’s all about.

Want to try? Contact me at editor_ann@eastlansinginfo.org.

And if you simply can’t contribute in this way, then please, contribute financially so we can pay more reporters. We don’t pay them a lot, but paying them does lead to more great stories for you. Help us out: click here.