Dear Reader,
Maybe you are like me - the coronavirus has consumed my attention since this crisis exploded six weeks ago. And maybe due to that, you’ve missed some of the other things happening across Michigan that aren’t directly linked to COVID-19.
Consider this the “in case you missed it” edition of my column. Because before and during the coronavirus crisis, MLive has had reporters working on other topics - many of which impact you and your family.
Let me recap some of the best of that work since the beginning of 2020:
Great Lakes water levels
“There’s simply too much water.”
With that sentence, MLive environmental reporter Garret Ellison captured a slow-motion ecological force – record high-water levels across all five Great Lakes – that are eroding shorelines, destroying homes, and impacting communities and commerce to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
Ellison’s report had experts agreeing: The culprit, largely, is climate change. While that may be open to conjecture among average people in social media channels, it is accepted in the scientific community.
“There is very little scientific doubt that we are seeing a strong response … to our increasing temperatures,” said Richard B. Rood, a professor in U-M’s Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering.
The authoritative package was shared on social media by advocacy groups and policymakers alike, including Liesl Eichler Clark, director of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, and has been used as teaching material by educators via Google Classroom.
Mental health struggles, in their own words
MLive is in the middle of a year-long project on the serious failings in Michigan’s approach to dealing with mental illness and mental health care. We’ve documented that one in five Michiganders is suffering from some mental health issue at any given time, and that it takes on average 19 calls to find an open care bed.
Our next phase of the project was extremely powerful: The human toll that mental health issues cause, in the words of those affected. We asked for essays, and ended up publishing 40 from people willing to come out of the shadows and talk about their experiences to help shed the stigma and educate us all.
State Rep. Mary Whiteford and U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell were among those who wrote essays; Washtenaw and Muskegon county health departments, which have been working on mental health advocacy, also shared and participated.
Dale Robertson, a Grand Rapids man featured in the project, shared “my thanks and appreciation for MLive taking on the entire project and doing it in a way that made it personal so that readers could truly connect.”
Changing skyline in downtown Ann Arbor
Quirky and quaint, Ann Arbor is known for its unique and varied downtown and nearby neighborhoods. All that is changing as city leaders embrace development proposals that include high-rises.
Project reporter Ryan Stanton calls it “perhaps the most debated and divisive issue in Ann Arbor politics: new development and the densification of the city.”
The series of stories showed the most comprehensive and contextual look yet at the issue: 1960s-era retrospective photos; data-driven reporting; interviews with residents who affected; an interactive map; and before-and-after slider views. “The series surely helped everyone who cares about these issues to put the bigger picture into focus and offered food for thought as the city further considers zoning and development matters,” Stanton said.
Ex-offenders struggle with housing
Journalism looks at issues across the whole spectrum of society, and that includes the most vulnerable, regardless of circumstances. In Grand Rapids, one group that is struggling is ex-offenders, whose path to rehabilitation is often blocked by an inability to find housing once they are released.
It’s an issue in many communities, but Grand Rapids’ housing market is hot, and higher prices make it tougher for recently released felons.
“Cheyna Roth’s reporting uncovered the hardship has become so extreme for those getting out of prison that it’s hindering them from turning their lives around,” said Eric Gaertner, the editor on the project. “These ex-offenders who are unable to fully integrate back into society are more likely to fall back into old habits, and possibly commit new crimes.
“That’s when we knew we had a story that would be important to the entire community.”
Kayla Rolland, 20 years later
As a society, we have sadly become numbed to gun violence at schools. But sadder still is that 20 years after a shooting that shocked America to its core, there has been little movement to solve the crisis.
That is a key takeaway in reporter Ron Fonger’s somber, thorough revisiting of the shooting death of 6-year-old Kayla Rolland at the hands of a 6-year-old classmate.
“There has not been much progress in Michigan,” said Linda Brundage, executive director of the Michigan Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, which is pushing for laws that would create new criminal penalties for failing to store a firearm resulting in injury or death.
“If a child has a gun, they got it from an adult,” she said. “If you’re not using (a gun), it should be locked up (because) most guns that (end up in) schools are obtained from the home.”
Fonger’s reporting shares two characteristics with all the work I shared today – how elusive progress can be, regardless of the cost of an issue; and, how it’s incumbent on professional journalists to keep shining the light on problems, and to seek solutions.
We haven’t taken our eye off that responsibility, even as we respond to a different kind of crisis. |