BIGGBY COFFEE IS coming to town.
The franchise coffee shop, headquartered in East Lansing, will be moving into a space at the strip mall that houses WJMN and Arby’s on Wright Street just off of US 41.
It just happens to be within shouting distance (if you’ve got a strong voice) of Starbucks on the other side of the highway.
Anticipated opening date: sometime in June.
Biggby Coffee was founded back in 1995 under the name “Beaner’s,” an unfortunate choice. After getting some grief–“beaner” is a slur for a Mexican–the franchise renamed itself Biggby.
It’s now expanded to nearly 200 stores in eight states, including one in the Soo.
It’ll offer specialty coffees, smoothies, pastries, and breakfast sandwiches.
As the opening date gets closer, they’ll be hiring a staff of 16-22 workers, all part-time.
Let the coffee wars begin.
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NOW THE FOIA wars.
Yes, the North Wind is submitting another FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to the NMU administration.
This one asks for the expense and travel records and the budget report of the NMU Board of Trustees over the last year. Oh boy, this one could tick off a few of the monied and powerful at the university.
Is there anything to it other than wild speculation, suspicion and curiosity? We’ll see.
Could the student journalist–Anthony Viola, by name–have simply requested the records from the administration, rather than FOIAed them? Good question. It would have been a simpler, less hostile approach, but it seems clear that the North Wind staff doesn’t fully trust the administration.
It’s totally unrelated to the previous FOIA requests dealing with Starbucks, Lenovo, and alleged intimidation, but it’s a continuation of what some might see as a troubling pattern.
It’ll be interesting to see how the administration responds. Will they ask to charge for it, as they initially did with the last FOIA request? Will they just sigh and shrug their shoulders, and comply? Will they say “Enough is enough”?
The North Wind faculty advisor Cheryl Reed is coming up for her annual evaluation in the next several weeks before the newspaper’s board, which includes five students, an administrator, a faculty member, an outside journalist, and Reed herself. She’ll have her union rep with her.
There’s little doubt that some in the administration and on the faculty aren’t crazy about her. She’s educated the North Wind staff about FOIA requests and she’s emboldened them.
But she’s also helped create a public relations problem for the university.
Has her “advice” gone overboard? Have the FOIA requests turned into little more than harassment? Is it just a game being played by student journalists who love poking administrators in the ass?
Reed says, absolutely not. The students are conducting legitimate investigative journalism based on news tips.
Interestingly, she says she came up to Marquette, hoping for a quiet period in her life when she could complete her book, “Poison Girls,” which deals with a group of affluent teenage girls in suburban Chicago who were dying of a particularly virulent form of heroin in 2008.
Her tenure here has not been as quiet as she might have hoped.
Whether she survives the evaluation process will be closely watched.
Oh, by the way, the Detroit News is working on a lengthy article on the NMU-FOIA controversy. Should be out soon.
And of course, the Mining Journal just did a four part series on it,
One thing you can say: This continuing story, for better or worse, is certainly putting NMU on the map.
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