Current-ly on the Porch

The Publisher’s Porch

If you’re reading this outside of Yale, there’s a pretty good chance you’re wondering who I am and why I’ve suddenly shown up in your newspaper somewhere other than the publisher’s box you see each week.

Fair question.

I’m Lonnie Scott, publisher of the five newspapers operated by Buried Lede Media: The Yale Expositor, Lansing City Pulse, The Hamtramck Review, The Tri-City Times in Imlay City, and The Tribune Recorder Leader in Sandusky. I also serve as CEO of Buried Lede Media.

Publisher’s Porch is a weekly feature I write for The Expositor about newspapers, our communities, my family, and whatever else happens to be on my mind.

If you enjoy this one, you can always subscribe to The Expositor to have my thoughts delivered to your mailbox each week.

This week, though, is a little different, because this is the first Publisher’s Porch appearing in all five of our newspapers, and the first edition of something we’re calling The Great Lakes Current.

The first edition of The Great Lakes Current appeared as two pages in most papers, it runs across four pages in City Pulse.

Buried Lede was built around a pretty simple belief: Local newspapers still matter. At a time when large newspaper conglomerates have gutted local newsrooms and replaced local reporting with stories written by someone halfway across the state, we’re trying something different.

Once a month, we’re asking the editors in each of our newsrooms to choose stories, columns, and opinions they think are worth sharing with readers in our other communities. And we’re putting them right alongside the local news you already expect from us.

We’re not cutting pages to make room for the Current.

We’re adding pages to the newspapers you already read.

We know you might not agree with everything you see. A reader in Capac may have a very different reaction to a column from our alternative weekly in Lansing.

Something written in Hamtramck might raise a few eyebrows in Sandusky, etc.

That’s OK. In fact, that’s part of the idea.

Michigan is a big, complicated and wonderfully diverse state. We think there’s value in occasionally seeing what people in another corner of it are talking about, worrying about, celebrating or debating.

The Current is our chance to do exactly that once a month. To go with the flow, if you will. (Get

it? Because it’s the Current? I’ll see myself out.)

We’ll probably learn a few things and make some changes along the way. That’s part of trying something new.

For now, welcome to the first Great Lakes Current. I hope you’ll join me back here on the Porch next month. Unless you’re reading this in Yale, or my earlier sales pitch worked and you’re one of our brand-new Expositor subscribers. In that case, I’ll see you back on the Porch next week.