ELi’s Impact

East Lansing Info (ELi) has been providing the people of East Lansing with real, nonpartisan, nonprofit news since September 2014. ELi has become a model for how small American cities like ours can bring themselves the news – and, in doing so, how a local news organization can engage a whole community in the understanding of why journalism matters to local democracy.

ELi is based on the ideal of the great investigative journalist David Carr, who believed that the internet had produced a “golden age of journalism.” Given that the internet has caused the economic collapse of traditional investigative journalism, Carr’s idea of this being a “golden age” for journalism may sound upside-down.

But Carr’s point was that, because of widespread access to the internet and smartphones, citizens could be emboldened to not only question what is really going on in our communities but also to write it down, record it, and report on what is really going on in our communities.

ELi functions as a “news brigade.”

Here’s how we see it: If East Lansing didn’t have a fire department, we would have to have a fire brigade, made up of ordinary citizens dedicated to putting out our–neighbors and businesses–fires.

Because we don’t actually have a dedicated news organization made up entirely of professional journalists, we have had to create a news brigade to save our community from living without a basic component of a functional democracy: real, timely, meaningful news.

At ELi, we recruit professional reporters and other capable citizens – stay-at-home parents, retirees, high school students, underemployed individuals, and sometimes working people embedded in news that needs reporting – and we empower them  to report high-quality, meaningful, nonpartisan local news.

We cover serious issues in East Lansing.

Our reporting has included a $200 million debt for a city of only 20,000 permanent residents, a government prone to the usual problems of loyalty and obfuscation, a school system that – like all in Michigan – gets inadequate support from the state, a Mom-and-Pop electric company that reasonable customers have to worry about, environmental risks, racial bias in our local policing, and more.

Like every other, our community needs investigative reporters who will make public records requests, watch for unequal treatment by government (including by law enforcement), and follow the money. We also need people who will keep neighbors informed about the needs of the less fortunate, the labor of artists and public service employees, and the offerings of locally-owned businesses.

All this is why a large group of us work to form East Lansing’s news brigade. So far, about 150 local people have been reporters through ELi, and many more have served as tipsters, advisers, and supporters.

Because we use a blended model of volunteerism and paid work, and because no one gets paid very much through ELi, we currently operate on only about $150,000 a year. With that sum, we consistently provide news of city government, lawsuits involving the city, local schools, local businesses, environmental issues, and arts and entertainment opportunities.

East Lansing would have almost no organized local news reporting without us.

But what’s even more exciting about our news production is that, by engaging so many people in this community service project, what we’ve done is cause a vibrant local conversation about how journalism matters.

ELi gets people here to talk (and argue productively) about:

Because of ELi, East Lansing started having conversations about these issues years before we had a president who would call reporters “the enemy of the people,” years before we would learn how social media can be manipulated by foreign governments interested in pushing propaganda and sowing discord and disarray, and years before the unprecedented pandemic would destroy our local economy.

Because of ELi, our city has long had a grassroots literacy campaign that has helped us defend ourselves in the age of disinformation and extraordinary political stress.

We are so excited that people are now paying attention to this model, seeing in it what we do: a chance to reawaken an appreciation of high-quality, old-fashioned journalism in America from the ground up.

Our work at ELi has been featured in The Christian Science Monitor, the Lenfest Institute’s report on local news operations, the Poynter report on local news (twice), The Guardian, and The Membership Puzzle Project’s report on news operations like ours that engage audiences in news production.

We have had over 700 local people and over a dozen small businesses in town support our work by contributing financially. We take no advertising and do no “native advertising” (manufactured news for profit).

Our economic method shows you just how seriously we take accountability to our community.

If you want to support our efforts with a donation, please do so right now. If you live here and want to become a reporter with us, contact us. If you want to keep track of what we’re reporting, sign up for our free mailer. We need you to be engaged with us to make this work.