Your ELi

Two student deaths at East Lansing High School in the course of a month have saddened many in the community. At ELi, we feel the impact not only as East Lansing residents but as parents; my son only recently left our public schools and Publisher Alice Dreger’s son is still a student at ELHS. One of our reporters, Danny Kaplowitz, is himself a student at ELHS, and our board Vice President, Vic Loomis, is a graduate of ELHS and has children at the school. I could go on and on with this list.

As I reported recently, ELi is looking for more reporters. On Thursday, February 4, we’ll be holding a free, open, informational meeting from 7:00-8:00 p.m. in Room 211 of the Hannah Community Center to talk with all community members who are interested in what we do at ELi, particularly for those who might want to be reporters or who know someone who should be reporting for us.

Above: A memorial stone made by the author’s husband for the author’s all-time favorite pet rat.

East Lansing Info (ELi) prides itself on providing only factual, non-partisan content. As part of that, we prohibit editorializing in our articles. When we write and edit, we take special care to ask ourselves whether someone could reasonably see a word choice, a claim, or a presentation as opinion rather than fact.

Eighteen months into ELi’s life, we’ve decided to make one exception to this rule, and that is for pet obituaries.

It’s tough getting back to “normal” life after the holidays, and life at ELi is no exception. Nevertheless, I’m proud of what we’ve done for you just since we returned on January 4.

At ELi, we limit ourselves strictly to nonpartisan, non-editorial news. As a consequence, we generally refrain from doing anything like “news analysis,” because that tends to veer into subjectivity. And while no one is ever perfectly objective, we do try like heck to be as factual, fair, and balanced as we can be, so that eastlansinginfor.org can be a place where all citizens of East Lansing can go for straight news about their community. We reporters are human, which means we have opinions, but we try hard to leave those at the door when we report for you.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was writing to tell you what a typically crazy week it had been at ELi. So much going on, so many reporters assigned to so many important stories! What a difference a couple of weeks on the calendar makes around East Lansing. Today, everyone is either away or laying low, enjoying the break. As you’ll understand, it makes sense for ELi to be mostly on break during this period, too.

We’re reaching the end of ELi’s first full calendar year, and I would personally appreciate if you would take a moment to reflect with me on whether we are meeting our stated non-profit mission: providing local news and information specifically focused on East Lansing, with the aim of educating citizens, supporting fact-based dialogue, building community, bridging generations, and teaching people—from high school students to senior citizens—how to do non-partisan, non-editorial embedded reporting for their own community.

Above: Screenshot of the presumably satirical "Steve Meadows" Facebook page.

This coming Tuesday evening, I will be representing ELi at the Ingham County Board of Commissioners’ meeting. We are appealing the County’s response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request related to the “Steve Meadows” mystery.

We are so very excited to announced that Eli’s October fundraiser, aimed at raising $10,000, has raised $14,807! That is almost 50% more than we were aiming for!

Your amazing generosity will ensure Eli’s continued success and will allow us to do even more great work for you, our readers, than we had planned! Managing Editor Ann Nichols and I are beside ourselves with gratitude and excitement.

Today I’m going to tell you about my trip to Berkeley, California, last weekend—what I discovered among the clouds of marijuana smoke and bare feet—but first I have to cover some history.

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 need to raise $10,000 this month to keep us going through the end of January. Without that money, we can’t bring you more government and politics coverage, Trojan soccer stories, or deep takes on local treasures like Beggar’s Banquet and The Northern Tail Dog Park. We can't keep paying the small sums we do to keep our worker bee reporters buzzing around town, bringing you back news from our schools, our neighborhoods, our local businesses, and our local crafters and farmers.

I need your help.

The ELi coffers are starting to run low. We knew this would happen right about now, because people in East Lansing tend not to donate to ELi until we run a dedicated fundraising campaign, and our last campaign was last spring.

We’re okay with that pattern. So long as people respond to our campaigns—which so far has worked out!—it’s all fine. Otherwise, especially for Managing Editor Ann Nichols and me, it means stress, a mounting sense of panic, and a concern that you don’t think the work our team is doing for you is worth supporting with a few dollars.

What does our moon meeting our mugs have to do with our mission here at ELi?

This week Robert Victor, former staff astronomer and now a volunteer of MSU’s Abram’s Planetarium, brought us news of tomorrow’s lunar eclipse. As you can read in his article, there will be a special gathering on the parking garage behind the planetarium starting around 7 p.m. for those who want to watch the eclipse together, in the company of professional sky-gazers.

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.