Your ELi: Are We Crazy?

Image: Update on our fundraiser; still a way to go before the end of the month.

We would really appreciate if you would read this, straight through to the end.

We are both pretty sensitive people. Alice may look infinitely tough, and Ann may look infinitely calm, but the truth is we bleed kind of easily. It’s a major reason we’ve taken on the never-ending work that is ELi: because we feel intense empathy for our fellow citizens of East Lansing.

We work really, really hard to stick to ELi’s principles of being non-partisan, non-editorial, precisely accurate, and what a reasonable person would consider fair. Sometimes we get in a zone where we find ourselves so into the non-partisanship that it feels rather Zen. On the same day we work on a story about a happy partnership between a neighborhood and the City (parks!), we work on a story where a group of citizens feel let down by the City (sewers).

The result of this approach is that while we feel really pretty positive about what we’re doing, we’re always seeming to disappoint or even anger someone.  Sometimes they take it out on us, through a grouchy public message or by telling us personally that even though they love ninety-eight percent of our coverage, one recent article has made them decide not to donate to us again “at this time.”

Sometimes we have trouble getting certain key people in City staff to answer our questions. Make no mistake; many do answer, and answer promptly, helping us find out what you need to know about finances, City infrastructure, and so forth. But there are a lot of questions on which we are simply never answered.

Take, for example, our attempts to find out how many people were transported to the hospital during the Oregon game festivities. We’ve heard 250, and heard from a Sparrow nurse that Sparrow’s ER finally had to start turning people away, but City staff have not been responding to our questions in spite of many messages left.

We push anyway. Every day, Ann assigns reporters to track what’s going on in our schools, in our City, and in our neighborhoods. As the Managing Editor and Publisher of ELi, we encourage our reporters to be nosy and persistent where necessary.

And the result is that our team brings you news no one else would. Who else has reported for you on Council debates over the over $6 million in tax increment financing ultimately approved (mostly in split votes) by our current City Council? Who else has brought you detailed campaign finance analysis and regular school board reporting? Who else brings you news “too small” for others to report, like the naming of Corey Cafagna Park?

Look at what happened just this week: We reported in our Council Capsule a developer looking to pave a spur to the Northern Tier Trail. (No one else would report such a puny story.) Then, the next day, the same reporter (happened to be Alice) bothered to go out to see what was really going on at the spot, and discovered the developer had been ripping out trees along the trail before getting Council’s permission. She alerted the City Manager’s office immediately, and we told you within the hour.

Sure, the LSJ had a story up about it later in the day—including the news the City had stopped the developer following Alice’s call to the City Manager’s office (although they didn’t mention us, of course). But do you think the LSJ would have covered this, or that the City Manager’s office would have found out when they did, if it wasn’t for ELi’s existence? We don’t think so. We’ve seen this happen with other stories, time and again, in the last year: our reporting leveraging greater journalistic attention to East Lansing.

A lot of people tell us they are grateful for the ELi team’s work. But a few people tell us that some non-ELi journalists around here as well as some folks in power call us “crazy” and “annoying.” And that kind of bad-mouthing of us—in spite of all we do to maintain an extremely high level of journalistic integrity and devotion to this public service—hurts us. It hurts us emotionally, it hurts our fundraising, and it hurts our reporters’ ability to get the information they want to bring you.

We could bring you nothing but mindless, feel-good click-bait. We could avoid ticking off people in power by never publishing what might make them uncomfortable. We could avoid giving you the excruciating levels of detail and education we often provide.

But then we wouldn’t be fulfilling our full mission. Yes, part of our mission is to build a positive sense of community. And we believe we are doing that. But our mission is also to tell you the important truths—truths that often make us just as squeamish and uncomfortable as they make you.

If you appreciate fifty percent or more of what we do—if you think to yourself what ELi has done for this City and find yourself concluding what we do, that ELi has changed the landscape ultimately for the better—then we need you to support us, even though we sometimes tick you off or disappoint you.

That means supporting us publicly with words, and it also means donating so that we can keep going.

Very few people did that this week, in this second week of our month-long fundraiser. You may think news reporting is free, because you often get the product for free. It isn’t. That’s why the City Pulse has a ton of ads and why the LSJ requires a subscription. Our model is different—non-profit, non-commercial—but it still requires money. The good news for you is supporting ELi gets you a tax deduction and an incredible return on your investment. (See our first year financials.)

Help us out. Put in a good word for us. And send us $20, $50, $100—whatever you can afford. ($500 gets us $1,000 this month.) Please, donate today.