ELi Wants to Hear From You as We Envision Our Future Together

As East Lansing Info considers how to best serve the community, we are asking for your help. Do you mind sharing your thoughts with us?

As ELi’s founder Alice Dreger explained last week, ELi’s Board of Directors will continue to ensure that ELi remains a nonprofit, factual, honest, nonpartisan news organization, but since ELi has shifted from a mostly volunteer-based staff to a professional one, we now need to compensate our staff at competitive rates to keep delivering the same quality news.

With the departure of Acting Executive Director and Publisher Emily Joan Elliott on May 6, ELi will need to hire someone to fill the roles she is vacating, including fundraising, development, and managing staff. ELi will offer the new leader a salary of $50,000 and a stipend to cover health care benefits. More details will be made available shortly in an official job description and call for applicants.

ELi’s Board will also begin working with key community partners to assess East Lansing’s reporting needs and wants and how to best balance that with paying our reporters and other staff a competitive living wage. As the Board continues to analyze that, we are hoping you can help us.

ELi’s staff and Board of Directors have discussed what information we need to best serve the community and developed two surveys. If you only have a couple of minutes to share, please fill out this survey. It is a series of yes-and-no and multiple choice questions to find out more about what you value in ELi and what you would like to see going forward.

If you are able to spare 10 minutes or so, we have developed this survey, in which you can write your own responses to our questions. This qualitative information will help us understand how we best serve our readers and what our readers need in this valuable community resource.

The opening of this article was edited for clarity on April 13, 2022, at 6:33 p.m.