What Even is Flint. Daily.?

I guess it is only appropriate that after about two full weeks of posting stories out of nowhere, I provide an explanation for what Flint. Daily. actually is. 

Much like an actual alarming number of things my younger self would find appalling about my older self as I age, the idea started with just being annoyed about what would be minor stuff to a normal person. Here’s a probably incomplete list of those frustrations and how they led me here.

Listening to my Kids Defending Stuff They Shouldn’t Have To

There’s no shying away from Flint’s negative reputation. It’s out there, and we all have our different ways of dealing with people who are still making water jokes, or who assume that you can’t step out of your home without crime lurking around every corner from you. I’ve sort of made peace with the fact that you can’t really change ignorance, particularly from people who don’t have a desire to learn nuance or venture out of their comfort zones or meet new people. 

But what got to me recently was watching my 11-year-old daughter interact with some of her suburban friends who were downtown. She loves it downtown. We hang out down there every weekend. She was excitedly telling a friend about the sushi place she loves in the Farmers’ Market (shoutout, Lucky Cat!) and her friend’s reply was, “Is it safe to go there?” 

I don’t blame the friend, she’s actually lovely, and it’s obviously life inexperience combined with parroting narratives from a parent or adult who should be smarter. My son is older, but he also encountered those types of things when he was younger. My favorite was his third grade class getting ready for a field trip to Sloan Museum, and a kid who had definitely never been to Flint before boasting about how his parents weren’t letting him go on the field trip because “it’s in a dangerous area.” Oliver couldn’t stop laughing, because what else can you even do about someone afraid of the Cultural Center?

Flint’s problems are complex and real, and I would never minimize them. But Flint is also cool as hell. There are talented people here, amazing art, music, and cultural scenes, good restaurants, summers full of festivals and events, an absolutely insane history, and mostly, it’s home. And so at the highest level, this site is simply meant to be a love letter to our home and all the beauty and flaws that are a part of it. 

No One Just Calls Things What They Are

Have you ever watched a Flint City Council meeting? How about a Mott Community College Board of Trustees meeting? How about both in one night? I did that on Monday, mostly because I might secretly hate myself. A Flint City Council member, Leon El-Alamin, is facing really serious domestic violence charges. He, like everyone, is entitled to due process and to defend himself in court. However, no reasonable person would deny that the charges and accusations are ugly or that, if they are true or even partially true, it calls into question his suitability to serve on the Council. 

But El-Alamin also represents a decisive fifth vote on a Council that is deeply and often bitterly divided. In Monday’s meeting, El-Alamin, Ladel Lewis, Jonathan Jarrett, and Dennis Pfieffer were absent. Two of the remaining five council members, Tonya Burns and Jerri Winfrey-Carter, wanted a resolution added to the agenda to ask El-Alamin to step away from his Council duties until his legal situation is resolved – not an unreasonable request! The other three – Judy Preistley, LaShawn Johnson, and Candice Mushatt didn’t. We deserve better framing and more nuance from our elected officials on a serious issue than simply viewing it through the lens of a political football game. An ethical issue has basically been boiled down this: “His vote typically hurts this group so they want to get him off the council. His vote typically helps this group so they want to keep his vote.”

That’s honestly such a disservice to the community and to voters. But it’s also not uncommon.

A similar situation has played out on Mott’s board over the past year. Before her resignation this month, former Trustee Janet Couch represented a decisive vote for a majority on a deeply divided board. So it didn’t matter that Couch had an abysmal attendance record at meetings, and it didn’t matter that racist and homophobic social media posts from a page under her name had surfaced. She helped them squeeze through several controversial decisions, including the hiring of a new president, on 4-3 votes. When the posts surfaced, only two of the four members of the voting majority that relied on Couch’s vote even offered lukewarm public rebukes of her statements. And on Monday, not that it matters any more since she resigned, board chair Jeffrey Swanson revealed that their investigation had concluded and found that she didn’t violate board policy because the posts happened before she was on the board and Couch apparently claimed her account was hacked. 

There has been local news coverage of both of those issues. So this site doesn’t exist to bash the remaining journalists we have left in Flint after the industry has been hammered by cutbacks over the past 20 years. But a part of our niche will definitely be saying that things that are regressive or are stupid or are clearly putting political games ahead of doing the ethical thing or just flat out suck … do in fact suck. First and foremost, before I am anything, I am a resident and citizen of the city and we are all impacted by the behavior and decisions of elected officials here. And if I, as a voter and taxpayer, think something is bad or dumb, I’m going to do my best to explain why it’s bad and dumb. Those pieces will always be labeled as opinion, but informed criticism is a vital part of creating more accountability for elected officials and forcing them to at least answer more questions.

Also, I will say, a public commenter who was very nervous to speak and couldn’t stop profusely swearing and then apologizing for swearing because of his nerves was one of the most adorable things that’s ever happened at a Flint City Council meeting. 

I Can’t Find Flint Things That I Want

Now to really show my age, I absolutely hate how news and information is presented online. There are great journalists doing good work at the Flint Journal. And if I go to check out the Flint Journal webpage, I have to sift through a bunch of non-local stories I’m not interested in.

Finding local events is so much worse. Millions of people use Facebook to find events and things to do in their communities, I work in marketing and I’ve seen the stats. But Facebook actually sucks! Obviously from a moral perspective, but I’ll save that rant for another time. From a strictly usability perspective, if I search for events in Flint, they pop up but they aren’t listed in order by date! It’s a completely useless tool, you often find out about cool events you’d like to attend after they’ve passed, and I just want a damn community calendar that lists everything in order in one place. So I built one. You can find it here or in the main navigation of the site in the top corner. It’s ugly, it has no frills, but it already lists hundreds of events going on in Flint in the order they happen. And in a true nod to the site’s name, if you scan just through September, you can see that there are cool things going on in Flint. Daily. 

Trying to Quit Complaining

As a world class hater, I’m not opposed to sitting around and complaining. But I’ve written about Flint and Flint’s people for, as of next year, 20 years. My family loves it here, we’ve rebuilt a life here after some traumatic and tumultuous times. I’ve made incredible friends here who have become family – which is truly a Flint story, because isn’t everyone here cousins anyway? 

I’m at a point in my life where I want to do something. And I’m not sure starting a local news site in my spare time will actually do anything. But I’m going to try. We have no money. We have no real goal in mind, other than sharing cool or important stories. We are pro-Flint, but we’re not so “pro-Flint” that we put blinders on about things that need to be fixed or things that are problems. A good news/good vibes only news website doesn’t actually benefit anyone. 

For now, this is a spare-time venture for me. I work full-time, but I’m also out in the city a lot. So I’m committing to spend the bulk of my nights and weekends talking to people, learning new things about the city, writing, and sharing those stories (and if my bosses are reading, these posts go live during work hours but I schedule them the night before don’t worry I’m not doing non-work stuff at work!).

Things feel particularly apocalyptic in the country right now, and I’ve been obsessed thinking about how we reconstitute some idea of community? How do we reconnect? How do we encourage our kids to talk to people, to learn about people who are different than they are, to make an effort to understand privilege and struggle and when we have the former use it to improve things for people who have the latter?

Some Details and a Couple Calls to Action

We’ve been in soft-launch mode for two weeks while we built the site. Our official launch is September 1, 2025, or Labor Day … which felt fitting for a Flint-centric publication. If you’d like to contact us with story ideas, calendar events, or other concerns, the email address is team@flintdaily.news. 

We will have a weekly newsletter that links to everything published that week. Visit here and submit your email address to subscribe. It will go out Tuesday mornings. Also, please follow our social media: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Bluesky, if you use any of those platforms.

Currently, our contributors are myself and Jenifer Veloso. She also works full-time, but is passionate about Flint and about community journalism and storytelling. Between the two of us, we hope to have at least one story up most days of the week.

I would love to add other contributors, but I also don’t believe in asking people to work for free. It’s bad karma. And as of now, we aren’t funded. I would love to be funded in the future. I don’t really know how people get money, though. So stay tuned while I try to figure that out. If and when we do have some advertising or funding support, we will be transparent about sharing where those funds come from and it won’t influence editorial coverage or decisions.

The site’s artwork in the masthead, newsletter graphics, and social media icons was designed by Oliver Hayes. Yes, that makes him a nepo baby. He’s an aspiring artist in the Portfolio Development Program at the Flint Institute of Arts, and I love the designs he came up with for the site. 

Like most things in my life, I probably launched into this without enough forethought or planning. But at a certain point, it’s just important to try shit and dive in. So that’s what we’re doing here. We hope you like it, but more importantly, we hope it brings to light what we love about Flint everyday.