Your ELi: All the ELi News Facebook Shows You

A significant portion of ELi’s readership uses Facebook to access the news we bring the community, but there is something we want to tell you about that.

The editorial and reporting teams at ELi work hard to bring you a range of stories from investigative pieces on important issues to profiles on new businesses in town.

But are you seeing all that? We are concerned that you are missing some of our most important pieces if you only read ELi articles after seeing them in your Facebook newsfeeds.

Here’s the problem. Facebook doesn’t care if you see our news. In fact, it seems to suppress some of our articles.

This isn’t a new problem.

In 2018, Publisher Alice Dreger wrote a “Trojan Horse” article at the request of then-Managing Editor Ann Nichols because an ELi voter guide was not reaching readers on Facebook. Ann applied to boost the post – meaning ELi would give Facebook a nominal sum to push the article out further. Facebook rejected both the initial request and the subsequent appeal.

Alice titled the Trojan horse article “The Seven Words We Can’t Say on Facebook” and revealed that articles with headlines, summaries, and ledes with the words vote, elect, ballot, propose, approve, decide, and polls were suppressed.

We know that this is still a problem, just as it has been since 2018.

Are you getting our updates on what you missed from City Council meetings, including the newest appointee and the search for a new City attorney? Did you see who applied to be on the Independent Police Oversight Commission? Did you learn about the City’s troubled finances related to pensions?

We covered all those important stories in the last week or two. While we can post them on Facebook, we can’t control whether they make it to your newsfeed. Facebook is stopping a lot of our posts.

Do you want to make sure you don’t miss some of the most important local news? Here’s what you can do!

You can sign up for our email mailing list. If you subscribe to our News Alerts list, you will get an email every time we publish a new story. You should expect one to two emails a day.

You can also subscribe to our Biweekly Mailer, generally delivered on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday mornings. Those emails contain all the stories we published since the last mailer.

ELi has also started a new, monthly paper edition! Guarantee that you get the monthly paper edition of ELi mailed to your home or business by completing this form and donating a minimum of $60 per year to ELi.

Thank you for relying on ELi. We value your support and want to make sure you keep getting all the valuable news we provide!