ABSTRACT
Historian of science and medicine Alice Dreger—who explored challenges to researchers' free speech and free inquiry in the book Galileo's Middle Finger—reports what happened over the course of seven years after she convened a small group of politically diverse, civic-minded citizens to join together in 2014 to bring nonpartisan news to the college town of East Lansing, Michigan. As she explains in her contribution to the volume, this turns out to be not just the story of the importance of government-independent news to local democracy, but also a story of how engaged members of the project learned the fundamental importance of freedom of the press to three other freedoms that are ensconced in the First Amendment: the freedom to speak, to protest, and to raise objections to the government without fear of reprisal.
