A quick heads-up on some future posts. I’ve recently started writing for East Lansing Info (ELi for short), a “non-profit citizen-run local news cooperative” that provides “free, local, non-partisan, accurate news and information about East Lansing.” It’s a highly valuable news source in town, as our city is often overlooked by Lansing State Journal and State News except for MSU matters and municipal elections. I’m a daily reader, a financial supporter, and now a contributor.

I’ll likely be writing one or two articles per month, particularly when the school year is in full swing, though August will exceed that. I’ll be covering arts and government, though not evenly. I’m sure arts & music will be more my domain, but I’ll be assisting with city government reporting when asked and when there’s no conflict of interest. For example, to be perfectly clear, I won’t be writing stories on (SCENE) for ELi, as I’m too deep in the weeds. Between my various posts and public remarks and my serving on the city’s Arts Commission, one could even say I’m part of the story (however tangential). I’m sure my name would taint whatever article I wrote, even without any editorializing. (I’ve stuck to the available facts in my posts on this blog, but I clearly have a point of view.)

Now, I know that most of my readers aren’t local. But, occasionally, local nuggets have made it onto the blog when appropriate for various reasons, be it a concert I attended, a gig I played, or the Sturm und Drang of (SCENE) (which offers a case study of the shuttering of venues throughout the country).

As has been the practice (or non-practice, depending on how you look at it) on the blog for the past six years, I won’t turn my MT-Headed Blog posts into simple click-throughs to ELi. For ELi posts that have nothing to do with this blog’s usual content, both sites and worlds will continue to exist independently. However, if I’m reporting for ELi on something that’d work well here (or vice-versa), then I’ll engage in some cross-promotion. As an example, the next post after this will be an overly lengthy article I wrote for ELi. It needs truncating before publishing to their site, so my editor and I agreed to have me post the “tl;dr” & more musically weedy version here and the leaner “general” version there. (I imagine future cross-posts being analogous to this scenario.) Such posts will include disclaimers at the top.